About


Bio

A native of Rhode Island, Peter Dickison first began to paint pictures of Newport in his teens. He studied painting at the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, Massachusetts, graduating with a BFA degree in 1982, and attended the Yale University Summer School for Art in 1980 with a full scholarship. After Swain, Peter attended the Parson’s School of Design Graduate Program in Painting.

Dickison was a studio assistant from 1983 to 1985 for the artist Nell Blaine (1922-1996), traveling with her between New York City and Gloucester, Massachusetts, including a painting trip to Austria, Switzerland and Italy. Blaine was a former student of Hans Hoffman and was influenced by modernists such as Mondrian, Leger and Hélion and by jazz music.

Dickison lived in France in 1989 while working for the Cleveland Institute of Art in Lacoste. There he assisted drawing professor Leonard Stokes, taught landscape and figure drawing, and painted prolifically in the landscape. After returning from France, he lived in the Hudson River Valley north of New York City, where he painted landscapes of the region often populated with human figures merging into the natural forms of their surroundings.

Since returning to Newport in 2003, his paintings have continued with landscape and figurative themes, expressing his evolving vision of human understanding of nature. The ambience and structures of Newport have returned to his work, a homecoming that has enhanced his compositions. Many canvases make use of narrative literary and mythological subjects from the canon of European painting.

Dickison lives with his family in Newport and is on the faculty of the Newport Art Museum. Exhibitions of his work have been mounted at the Prince Street Gallery in New York City, the Newport Art Museum, SUNY Purchase Art Gallery, Crowell’s Fine Art in New Bedford and Deblois Gallery in Newport.

Education

  • 2005 Harvard University Extension School Cambridge, MA
    Certificate, Website Design.
  • 1983 Parson’s School of Design New York, NY
    Master of Fine Arts Program in Painting.
  • 1989 Fashion Institute of Technology New York, NY
    Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Decorative Arts Restoration.
  • 1982 Swain School of Design New Bedford, MA
    Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Painting.
  • 1981 Yale University Norfolk, CT
    Painting Program for the Summer School of Art.