Dustbuster News

Sharing your news with SPS members has become easier than ever!  We have an entire page of our new website, as well as our daily Instagram posts,  dedicated to your artistic accomplishments, workshops, events or publications.  Basically, anything that’s happening in your art world can be shared with other members and followers. Use the Share News Link in the Box above or within the Members Only area when you log in with your user name and password.  You don’t even have to wait for a specific date/deadline.  So, what are you waiting on?  Please share!

It is with great sadness that we share the news of Ron Pircio’s passing unexpectedly on April 15th, 2022.  Ron served on the SPS board for many years, in many capacities, including Vice President of SPS.  Ron developed an interest in art while attending free drawing classes at the Cleveland Art Museum.  The Old Master’s realism in their still life paintings and their bold colors inspired and intrigued him.  He worked in pastels and oils, painting landscapes and still life.

“I find that there is elegance and simplicity in a painting.”  He was often referred to as “Ron Pearcio” for his many paintings of Pears in almost human-like settings.  Ron’s world famous pears became his identity.  “The pears are a still life with a twist and take on human attributes.  Although the backgrounds vary, the pears hover in family groups, standing alone or falling from the sky.”  Individuals and corporations throughout the country collected his works. Ron painted approximately 335 pear paintings.

Ron will be sorely missed by all those who knew him.

Please join us at the beginning of our SPS May Monthly Program, on May 9th, at 6:30 PM, where we will have a brief remembrance of Ron Pircio.

March 

Desmond O’Hagan dazzled SPS members and friends on painting unconventional subjects.  He describes his own work as ‘representational with many abstract elements’.  Desmond explained that he feels that switching back and forth between working in oils and working in pastels strengthens his process as a whole.  He tries for the pure colors of pastels when working  in oil, and uses wide swaths of color almost like a brush work when working in pastels.  He uses mostly Canson Mi Tientes paper (smooth side), which has helped him develop a fairly minimal approach to laying down colors in pastel.  He used referenced photos along with paintings to illustrate his focus on contrast and  balance in values, temperature and color intensity.  

April 

Micah Goguen, an art teacher and art therapist, invited members to consider what part of artmaking brings joy, and where they would like to go on their artistic journey.  Showing a series of mixed media portraits and landscapes, Micah shared his playful intentions and richly innovative processes including collage, stenciling, alcohol washes, layering pastel ground, and underpainting with fluid acrylics, marble dust and more.  In the second part of the program, Micah focused on textures and techniques, demonstrating how different media interact with substrates treated with a range of grounds.  The program dramatically expanded members’ sense of the possibilities for playing with expressive texture using pastels and other media. 

May

Jeff Olson with Rembrandt Pastels will present a program on the history of pastels which will show us the evolution of the craft with some of the masters. He will also be demoing techniques on loose and quick ways to sketch in shapes and values using an array of processes. Jeff will share some of his favorite ways to work with Rembrandt pastels while talking about benefits of working on dark papers.

June-August 

We will be taking a break during the summer with our programming while we schedule our 2022-2023 line up. We hope that you all will stay connected and continue to create during that time!

Our Fall 2022 Exhibition Prospectus for “All About Pastels” is available on ShowSubmit.  This show will be held at the Alpharetta Art Center from October 31st through November 29th. The exhibition will serve to advocate and inform the public about the medium of pastels.  We will have demonstrations, generous supply donations from our vendors along with technical information about what pastel is and how it is used.  This is a juried national show and works will be selected by signature artist Linda Richichi from Sarasota, FL.  Linda will be accompanying the exhibit with a 3 day workshop on Luminosity that you won’t want to miss!  More information and registration for this workshop will be listed in the events section of our website in the coming months. 

Creating Luminosity with Linda Richichi

Learn three secrets to creating a luminous painting; one that has an inner glow. In this 3-day workshop, experiment with the medium of your choice using prismatic color. Paint-along demos will assist you to make your colors sing. Discover how to bring life to your painting. 

Workshop is on Friday, Saturday, Sunday November 5, 6, 7 (9am -4pm) and will be held at the Alpharetta Art Center located at 238. Canton St. Alpharetta, Ga. Space is limited to 15 so we will honor first come, first serve basis. Linda Richichi graduated with a Bachelors in Fine Art from SUNY. Her work has exhibited extensively in the United States and she has received top awards and signature status from the Pastel Society of America. Having had an experience with synesthesia  (hearing color) allowed Richichi to have a more extensive vision for color. She leads workshops both online and in person around the country. www.lindarichichi.com

One would think that with Mikki Dillon’s long, capacious life of exploring, traveling, parenting, teaching, learning, leading, experiencing and creating, always creating, that she would have a lot to say through her art.  Mikki’s response? “I don’t ‘say.’ I just do.”

She has been “doing” art since about five years old, compiling DIY tools to create something, anything, around the homes she lived as a child.  Finding blue clay in the creek near her home in Birmingham, Alabama, and bringing it home to “make things out of it.”  Learning what works and that a box of crayons left on a steam radiator, doesn’t work.

“Always, always there was something in art that I did; anything that was around, I used.  My parents were very supportive,” she says.  Her father worked with the telephone company, and the job required moving.  As the only daughter, with a much older brother, Mikki found herself alone much of the time and learned how to entertain herself.  

“On my own, I could go walking for miles,” she says.

She’d walk to the nearest golf course and collect golf balls that were stuck in the mud.  Then, she’d clean them off and sell them to the golfers.

“That’s how I earned my money for many years,” she says. Friends came and went with each new living situation, but her desire to create remained. 

Her first “conscious painting” was a pastel.  Once, as an adolescent, vacationing in Maine, she took a box of pastels on her bike and headed to a stream. “I just sat down and painted,” she says. 

Mikki’s award winning pastels, watercolors, and photographs had their beginnings in this urge to create.  From childhood years in the Atlanta area, then Birmingham and later in Cincinnati, she recalls little art being taught in schools.  In high school, the art teacher taught students to copy things, but, since Mikki had spent her childhood creating on her own, she didn’t want to just copy.

“The art teacher didn’t know what to do with me,” she says, laughing.  

Once on a field trip to an inner city school, Mikki saw the art the kids were generating and it was “mind-blowing” she says. “I came back and remember thinking, ‘What in the world are we not doing here?’”

Mikki headed to Ohio State University to study art.  After two years, she met her husband, got her ring in December and got married in May. She quit college and went to work.  Her early years moving with her parents equipped her for life as a military wife.  While her husband served three tours in Vietnam, and with three children in tow, she made less art for herself, but created a home in all the locations they landed.

“Being an army wife has a lot to do with discipline,” she says. “You learn you have to do what you have to do and sometimes you have to do it all by yourself because your mate is gone. That’s something you either learn it or you leave it.”

Other military wives became mentors and taught her how to live with this kind of structured life.  “I was trained in keeping a group pointed in a certain direction,” she says. 

“We were the non-fighting part of the military, but we were part of the military. You were responsible for what your spouse and kids did.  It was a very important part of life, learning how to organize and prepare for things; just how to live successfully.  Because if you didn’t, you didn’t make it; you either left it or they left you.”

During their post at Fort Benning, Georgia, Mikki took art classes at Columbus College, now Columbus University. She paid for babysitting at the nursery on the post, and explored “everything.”  From plein air painting, printing, italio, lithography, to using her kids as models, to filling a sketchbook with drawings every six weeks, Mikki dove right in.

“I have a whole portfolio of things I did that year and that was wonderful because it kept me going in my work,” she says.  When they moved to Atlanta, she took ceramics, silk screen, stained glass, watercolor, (“which makes wonderful underpainting for pastels”).  Eventually, watercolors became underpaintings for all her pastels.

By 1988, she was well into pastels, competing and joining in many pastel societies.

That January 1988, the current president, Connie Reilly, founded the Southeastern Pastel Society.  Mikki got on board in February with the group.  Connie recruited many of the artists participating at the Atlanta Art Center where Mikki had been a member, and over the years, had worked almost every position. 

“We spent the first two years raising money, with yard and bake sales,” says Mikki. 

They enlisted free attorney advice who helped set up the SPS constitution and 501C status.  The group traveled to and displayed works at DeKalb College, Quinlan Center for the Arts and Oglethorpe College.

For 19 years Mikki edited the newsletter, “Dustbuster,” and sent physical copies to pastel societies around the world.  A subscriber of numerous art magazines, Mikki scoured pages of information to insert in the newsletter, and discovered pastel members were reluctant to share their art adventures.  Very few would send her their information.  How different it is today, with the ability to upload, online, your latest masterpiece for the whole world to see!

One activity after another kept Mikki rooted in art. She taught pastel for nine years in Gwinnett county, and in the city of Buford.  “Between AAC and SPS, we’d go all over and spend a few days [painting],” she says.  

Most of her career, she has painted from life, but has used photographic references, especially through Covid. She takes photography as seriously as her pastels, entering shows and doing workshops.  She belongs to several organizations including watercolor and photography societies, Norcross Gallery and Studios and National League of American Pen Women.  She has painted with the Plein Aire Painters of Georgia and painted nudes at the AAC.

Her one goal was to become a member with the Pastel Society of America.  Check!

Mikki considers herself a loner.  But, her years of taking charge as a military wife also allowed her to work with others, push herself through competing, and share art and life experiences with other artists.  She has taken road trips with artists, traveled to Italy and Japan. “Everywhere we went, we painted,” she says.  Each year she leads a group of artists who rent a house on Folly Beach South Carolina.

“Being in these groups, to be going places with other people; doing, sharing, and living with them, it’s been a wonderful experience,” she says. “You’ve got to be open to taking chances to go places.  The people I’ve met, the places I’ve gone to, it’s amazing.  And, it’s all through my pastels.”

Mikki’s style developed through “just doing what I wanted to do.”  A few times she ventured into abstracts, but she prefers painting in realism. She has taken workshops, but through her own teaching and continual painting, she says, “Whatever changes have come, they came because of what I’ve been doing. I was born a stubborn kid and used to doing what I want to do without anybody bothering me and I’m afraid I’m the same now.  I’ll do what I want to do and that’s it.  It’s stubborn, yes, but it’s self preservation.  You have to know that you want to do this.  Because, if you don’t, you might as well find something else.  You find your style by working.“

One of her paintings came about from a chance encounter. She was at an art outing where she saw a non-English speaking African woman with a child laying on a blanket.  She gestured to the woman that she wanted to take a photo of the child and the mother gave permission. 

The mother quickly got her other daughter to sit by the child, and Mikki snapped a photo.  When she painted the scene from that reference photo, she titled it “The Guardian.”  She sent the painting up to a Maine art show and it won an award.  But before the show opened, a white woman bought it.  Mikki learned later that the buyer had just adopted a black child, and the painting gave her a lot of meaning. That painting equally meant so much to Mikki.

Art thrills can happen through winning an award, someone purchasing your artwork, someone famous touting your talents on social media, or other revered artists paying you a compliment. They’re the stuff that makes an artist believe, “Aha! I’ve made it!”

Mikki says, “Winning things and getting in shows gives you an idea that you are getting better and you must be onto something that works.  But, I didn’t enter this field to make money.  If I do my very best that I can possibly do, then that’s what I live for. If other people like it, great.” 

But, what happens the next time you enter that award-winning art piece in a prestigious show, and it doesn’t get juried in?  “Rejection is just another part of it,” says Mikki. “It’s just one person’s opinion.  But you have to keep on doing it; you have to have the faith in your own work, especially for people who are just coming up.  It doesn’t mean a darn thing except that you got in that show or you got rejected.  You just keep on keeping on. That’s it.”

For more than six decades Mikki has been keeping on. “As long as I keep doing work that satisfies me, that’s what I want.”

Connect with Mikki through Facebook

SPS continues to evolve as part of the global renaissance of the pastel medium.  We have become a sought-after community of pastel artists and Southeastern Pastel is actively creating new benefits for our members who are from around the world.  All benefits are made entirely possible through our member volunteer team. There is no better way to get engaged with the SPS society whether you’re new to pastel or an established artist.  We strongly encourage you to join our team and help further distinguish SPS as a premier pastel society.

One of our most recent volunteers says “though only 1 month new to SPS, myself and another new member volunteered for FB Admins of our new Private Group.  Mind you – we had no previous experience as a social media admin – but with the support of other SPS members we were able to help build and launch our new Group!  Best of all, it has allowed me to immediately start getting to know the leadership and engage with our fellow master pastelists – what a great way to truly become part of the Society!”   Allison Woodward, FB Administrator

Our most urgent needs include: Exhibitions Chair & Team Members, Social Media Administrators, Publicity Chair, Communications Co-Chair & Zoom/Eventbrite Co-Chair.  Don’t let the titles daunt you! Key criteria are strong organizational & communication skills, willingness to volunteer and sharing your passion for pastels.  To learn more about these opportunities and  to join our amazing group of volunteers, please contact us at vpresident@southeasternpastel.com