About Dale
A native of Natchez, Mississippi, Dale Fairbanks lived and worked as an artist in Fairbanks, Alaska for ten years before returning to her southern roots in 2003. At home in Gulf Breeze, Florida, she works now in a large warehouse studio close to the bays and barrier islands of the Gulf of Mexico that feed her lifelong addiction to big water and sea-life.
Influenced by the experience of the Alaskan landscape and the lush, Deep South environment, her work is largely non-representational but often reflective of the natural environment in which she lives and works. Perhaps heightened by the subarctic frozen isolation of ten winters in the Far North, the artist's colors remain intense and complex in her Southern work.
A Note from the Artist
It took a haul across the North American continent to slip the shackles of the Mississippi Deep South. In Alaska I found I could paint with a freedom I had never experienced. In a land of extremes, of unspeakable splendor, of raw-edged, ragged landscape, of a people independent and defiant of authority, I discovered attitude. I could paint any damn way I wanted to without explanation, and yet I was haunted. Haunted by time discarded and the melancholy dark. I compensated in colors bold and ripe and hoped the dissonance would fall away.
A decade had passed when family and memories of warm sun and sand between my toes turned me homeward to the Gulf Coast of the Florida Panhandle. I was ill prepared for the rage and havoc that fell upon our beloved coastline in the summers of 2004 and 2005. Hurricane Ivan shredded tranquility by ripping our family out of our home and into a backyard trailer, slamming the roof of our warehouse studio into nearby woods and exposing all of my work to wind and water. I laboriously picked debris, seaweed, grass and rocks out of the oil paint, wiped the canvases down, and went back to work under blue tarps. Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, and Rita paid their respects in short order and dared us to stay, dared us to defy. Regret and self-pity have no place on anyone's recovery list, and we are united with our neighbors all along the entire Gulf Coast in our resolve to face the elements anew. We are working our way back...steadfast and strong, braced and ready.
I paint what I encounter, what I hear, what I am jostled by in the street. . I paint with an urgency that repels and attracts at the same time, scraping, layering, digging out, de-constructing, canceling, renewing. I work large-scale on 12-ounce tent canvas stretched over or stapled to hard wood surfaces. Abstract, ambiguous, unmoored at this southern water's edge, I am still what I push and pull across the surface: energy, chaos, control.
