"They're so, what they are," she said with a wry grin. "They don't ask questions. They just go about their business. What you see is what you get."
Take that viewpoint, add the fact that Dicker herself has a pureblood Akita and an Akita-husky mix, and consider that the lifelong art lover and emerging artist recently took an art class in which she focused on dogs.
 Chris Dicker peers out from her pack of dog paintings in her Half Moon Bay studio. |
In it, four Bay Area artists explore desert wildflowers to cut-outs to moments in nature - to Dicker's watercolors of dogs.
Dicker had taken a class through the league in which the teacher, Coastside artist Margaret-Ann Clemente, urged her to do the show as a step in presenting herself as a professional artist.
She drew from another, recent class with South Bay art teacher Mike Bailey, in which she had to artistically develop one subject over 10 weeks. Her topic was dogs.
"I like dogs and they're beautiful," she said. Working with the same topic over 10 weeks, "you have to try to do different things with it and push your creativity."
Much of Dicker's work - florals, landscapes and seascapes in watercolor, pastel or oil - is faithfully rendered realism.
But her dog paintings reveal her background in drawing, her love of line, and the trend known as "fauvism," a French expressionist movement of the 1920s, which involved painter Henri Matisse.
Characterized by bold distortion of realistic form and strong, heavily saturated color, fauvism was derided in its day because subjects were not painted realistically.
Neither are Dicker's dogs. The viewer has to study each painting for a few moments before the dogs emerge out of the strong lines and stronger color. Her style is an abstract interpretation in color: the dog outline is filled in with three-dimensional washes of purples, blues or greens.
"I took impressionism to the next level," said Dicker, adding that she includes labyrinths of lines and colors in each painting because "I like the fact that somebody has to read it. To play with it."
Reaching for new levels is typical Dicker, whose own life was filled with juxtapositions of cultures and experience.
Born in Southern California and raised in the Bay Area, she found art early. It started with drawing, painting and anything art that "I crossed paths with" as a child - like designing banners for summer camp. In high school she took painting and life drawing classes.
She said art has always been a hobby.
High school gave her life studies in other areas: her dad's work took the family to Bavaria, Germany. Enrolled in an American school in a German community, "I got a perspective of what it was like to be different, a non-European trying to blend in."
She also saw, close-up, the disastrous 1972 summer Olympic games in Munich, in which 11 Israeli athletes were shot. "It was my first brush with terrorism," she said, "and I saw the impact of that."
She veered away from art in her first year in college, which she spent in Switzerland to be near family in Bavaria. She completed college when her family returned to the Bay Area, studying business and modern languages at Santa Clara University.
She worked in business and administrative support until her 1985 marriage to husband John. When his work took the couple to Utah, she enrolled at the University of Utah to study art. Then the couple started a family.
For more than 18 years she has lived in Half Moon Bay, and taken art classes at the College of San Mateo. "I like to keep my hand in it," she explained, "and be around other artists" and in situations where the students give and receive critiques from each other.
Though she has dabbled in jewelry and sculpture, her preferred media is drawing and pastel. "I like the immediacy of hand to paper," she said. "That contact."
She has a spacious, bright studio on Purissima Street in downtown Half Moon Bay, and paints from photos or quick sketches of subjects (dogs do not sit still for long.)
"I like to work directly with an object," she said. "I spend 20 minutes or so (with the subject) and then I start to see colors. At that point, the subject starts to reveal itself."
She is also open to custom work, and can be contacted at cdicker@coastside.net.
Her eldest daughter, 18, "gets the same thing out of art that I do." Her youngest daughter, 16, attends Half Moon Bay High School.
What Dicker gets is grounding.
"Art is like a meditation that centers me, that balances me," she said. "It's a chance to sit still - our lives are really busy - look at something, reflect on it and get some energy from it.
"You learn from each painting you do. There's patience involved ... it takes patience, it takes concentration. It's the flow, when you get into that intense state of concentration. It's a magical thing."
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AT A GLANCE
What: Artists' reception for new exhibit including Half Moon Bay artist
Where: Main Gallery, Pacific Art League, 668 Ramona St., Palo Alto
When: 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 8
Cost: Free
Information: (650) 321-3891
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