Mark Dickson worked with the late Master Craftsman Jerry Grice
Sculptor Mark Dickson credits a great deal of his artistic inspiration to his paternal grandmother. “She was very involved in the Oakland Museum as a volunteer and docent, in California, where I grew up,” he explains. “She also had a collection of abstract modern art, which I was exposed to from a really young age. She was sharp
and smart. She’d tell us about the abstract artwork, and ask us what we saw and how we felt about it.”
But Dickson never considered art as a career for himself. He believed that in order to be an artist, you had to be able to paint and draw, neither of which were his strengths.
He didn’t discover welding and steel sculpture until he was almost 30.
“When I was in high school they had classes in photography, ceramics and even a drafting and architecture program, but I never took them,” he remembers. “I look back and think, ‘My god, they had stone carving and I never made the connection.’”