Herald artist of the month Dee Sidwell narrates with paint in pursuit of an environmental ethic

By SU STELLA/For The Herald — Fresh, bright and bold are three words to describe the amazing paintings created by artist Dee Sidwell.

Dee uses a masterful palette of colors with her nature-inspired paintings. Her powerful style suggests floral shapes usually without much detail. Her style has a realistic abstract quality because she layers the positive and negative spaces in her acrylic works.

Dee grew up next door to her Aunt Sally, who was both a painter and owner of a floral shop. Sally taught Dee about arranging and painting flowers, and that love shows 40 years later in her dramatic paintings. She is the fourth Oakridge-Westfir resident to be profiled as artist of the month in an arrangement between The Herald and the Oakridge Art Council. The group selected her in a drawing of names among its 30-plus members, and the process is to be repeated each month as a means of recognizing the community’s robust arts scene.

Dee Sidwell was born and raised near Atlanta and had five children when she was young. She attended Kennesaw State College studying chemistry and art history. She majored in chemistry because she wanted to go to work for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She was and still is passionate about protecting the environment.

She worked for Amoco Chemical on microporous membrane technology during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. A lot of that research done by many scientists in the ’80s led to the excellent PPE (personal protection equipment) available to healthcare workers today.

The family moved to Bend in 1992. Dee started working at a research facility shortly afterward. She continued working as a research chemist on microporous technology, mostly targeted at finding simpler ways to clean up polluted water. These technologies have been used on ships to clean up gray water but they also have many other applications.

In 1999, her dad invited Dee and her partner Frank to go into the nursery business with him. The kids were mostly doing their own things by then and even though she loved her job, she wanted some personal freedom from the 9 to 5.

They sold their house in Bend and bought a cute cottage in the Hemlock neighborhood of Westfir and started a whole new phase of life. She and Frank lived in Westfir from June to December and spent January thru May in Hiram, Georgia, where she grew up, running a wholesale nursery business. It was a fantastic gig for 18 years. She loved all of it — the very hard work, working with family and the travel.

It also allowed her six months per year to work on her art. She started selling in galleries in Oregon and in Georgia, entering and sometimes winning a ribbon in some competitions.

They sold the business in 2017, bought the piece of land that they live on now and started building a house. She removed the work that hadn’t sold from galleries and devoted all her time to helping with the construction. They did most of the interior themselves and it was hard work for two years, but they finished the buildings (house and cottage) and Dee could paint again.

Dee decided to really dedicate herself to painting, which brings her back to her chemistry roots.

“Chemistry is very important to understanding how everything works, including paint. A scientific researcher and an artist have much in common; they both need to be able to envision something that doesn’t exist yet and figure out how to make it exist. I was good at research because I am an artist not in spite of it.”

The group of paintings she is working on now is called “Mountain Songs.” She hopes to use them to illustrate her belief in the preservation of all nature, even in our back yards.

“About half are oil paintings, impasto style, mostly painted with a palette knife. These are usually sketched and I really try not to mix the paint on the canvas. I want to take my time and mix the right color before I lay it on the board or canvas. When I fail, I cut them off the stretcher bars and they become floor cloths in my studio. There are quite a few on the floor!

“There’s no second chance with these, but the really great thing is that oils don’t really change color when they dry like acrylics do, so that’s why I do love them. Plus I started out an oil painter.”

The other half of her paintings are acrylics on canvas. She usually doesn’t have a plan when she goes into the studio, but she will have a feeling about it. The first layer is usually high-flow acrylics that she sprays on the canvas randomly. These are painted quite the opposite of the oil paintings; they have many layers, almost all are transparent or semi-opaque. She works back and forth from positive to negative space as each layer goes down.

“My current paintings are an attempt to feel my way through what I think is an environmental crisis. One that we may not make it through, but the earth almost certainly will. I want to find a way to live as lightly as possible on this planet for the years I have remaining, and that’s becoming a story that I will be narrating with paint for a while.”

She has long been influenced by the illuminated works from the Middle Ages and of course Gustav Klimt’s fantastic paintings, so her final touch is adding metallic and gold leaf to some paintings.

When Dee is not painting, she really enjoys hiking, camping and running. Her love of gardening is really experimenting with lots of different sustainable gardening practices like “hugelkultur,” which is basically growing in an elaborate compost pile. She is trying to learn how to garden in a low-impact way and still have a space that is attractive and comfortable — not an easy task with our increasingly hot and dry summers.

She is a member of the Oakridge Westfir Chamber of Commerce board of directors and is currently the secretary. She tries to volunteer as much as possible in our town and has done that as long as they have lived here.

Currently, Dee is painting about three hours a day in the studio and when smoke permits, a plein air day. Her goal is to be back in a couple more galleries by the end of next year if COVID-19 cooperates.

Dee sums it up best.

“Going forward, my goal is to paint hard until I die. I want to go into my studio every day determined to not play it safe, never be concerned about whether it appeals to others or not, I just want to enjoy the process and it needs to make my eye happy for a little while. As I start to work my way out into galleries again, I need to remember this.”

You can find her works at the Westfir Lodge, the OAC gallery, Instagram @dsidwellartist and on her website, dsidwell.com.