J. Marshall Dyke's Artist Statement:

My favorite mediums are Oil, Watercolor, and Mixed Media. My main interest is COLOR.

I will spend hours just preparing the (oil) palette, asking myself “what are the possibilities!” This is something that has developed over the last 30 years of preparing for the classes that I teach. I need to have the right color/value that each person needs without stopping to mix it. It also speeds up the painting process, especially plein air painting, which I have been doing more of in the last few years, all the options are laid out for me. Perhaps it could be called micro-managing the palette. Also, all of the new acrylics products are very interesting and I experiment with them often.

The thing that makes me paint is curiosity. Subject matter can be anything, that is the challenge! In the last decade my paintings have become more abstract, working from the imagination and exploring color. I like working from the imagination; I will paint a landscape in summer and wonder what it would look like in winter.

I have always been interested in painting . I started in Junior High School, with my first endeavors in oil painting. High School proved to be even more intense, and private lessons after school with Carmen Unger, in Quincy. I attended Saturday classes at Massachusetts School of Art. I think that was the beginning of my interest in color. After High School I attended the Art Institute of Boston. The emphasis at the time was on abstract art. I stayed in school for two years and became frustrated with the more strict programs in the illustration aspect of art school.

Feeling that I was not learning anything, I left school and entered the U.S. Air Force. I was fortunate to work as an illustrator in the Air Force, and realized, it wasn’t that I hadn’t learned anything in art school, it was that I was not using what I had learned!

After the Air Force, I joined the Quincy Art Association, and did a lot of painting at the studio of Anet Pagglierani. I was then employed by the Veterans Administration Hospital, Jamaica Plain. where I worked as a clerk for 10 years, after which I got a position as a Medical Illustrator and started teaching oil painting at the Quincy Adult Education, then at the Town of Braintree’s program, where I have been teaching for 30 years