Longtime artist Dixie Rogerson-Bill is still actively working in her studio on a hill above Lincoln Creek northwest of Centralia.
The whimsical style of Centralia artist Dixie Rogerson-Bill is much in demand. She sells her artwork around the world.
A Dixie Rogerson-Bill sculpture depicts birds in a tree.
Dixie Rogerson-Bill is spending more time sculpting these days as she recuperates from recent surgery. Beneath her skilled hands, the figure of a lady is taking shape in the clay.
“I’d like her to have a few birds on her arm,” says Rogerson-Bill, a rural Centralia artist whose work is sold around the country. She pauses a moment then says with a delightful chuckle, “and maybe one on her head.”
When finished, the clay lady will stand some 14 inches high. After two weeks of drying in the studio, she will be baked in the kiln on low fire, then brought back into the studio to be glazed. Next she will be baked on high for seven hours.
Dixie’s first husband built her the large studio she works in and “cherishes” to this day, in the home she has lived in since 1953.
“I go to work in the studio for two hours or so. I used to work seven or eight hours and maybe get a painting almost finished. When you get older, you start to slow down,” she laughed.
Dixie has been painting for 75 years, she figures. She won’t reveal her age.
Art and creative endeavors have always been a part of Dixie’s life.
“I still have a great joy in creating,” she said. “I’ve always created, even as a child. When I was a teenager, I would make little dioramas out of shoe boxes, cutting out little windows, and tables and chairs, and with just a little bit of glue and a little bit of cardboard, I was sculpting.”
“I remember the first piece I sold, for two dollars,” she said. “It was a seagull on a stump and I was sixteen years old.”
Dixie had entered her art at the Southwest Washington Fair and sold it there.
Art is in her blood.
“I had a grandmother who painted and my sister painted professionally,” she said. “And my father drew, he was sketching all the time. There’s a gene that follows the line.”
Dixie also has fond memories of her biggest piece of art, a commissioned piece for the outdoor play toy company, Big Toys.
“They commissioned me to do a painting for their lobby and I had pictures of the wooden climbing toy and put children all over it,” she said.
A Centralia native, Dixie Dodd’s (her maiden name) first job was as a telephone operator.
“I graduated from high school at 17 and lied about my age a week later at the telephone company so I could get a job as a telephone operator for two years,” she said. “When I got married and pregnant right after, I quit the telephone company and stayed home and took care of the babies.”
Even then Dixie pursued her art.
“I had a card table in the corner of the living room with my art work and I would put a tablecloth over and tell the babies, ‘No, no! That’s Mommy’s.’”
While raising four children, “I was painting every day, as soon as they all went to school full-time, I really started dedicating myself to it, because I wanted to be a professional artist. I would paint for hours and hours and then when it got to be 1 p.m., I would stop and think ‘Oh, I haven’t had even a glass of water or food.’ Then I would do my housework. I dedicated my brightest hours in the morning to my art. By late afternoon, I couldn’t even think of how to draw a circle!”
“I started out painting realism in children and flowers, then I didn’t want to copy pictures anymore. I wanted to take the painting right out of my head. It didn’t happen fast. I started playing around drawing the things that came out of my head. I scribbled drawings with lines overlapping and I painted them,” she said.
Dixie and her first husband, Jim, raised four children; Mark, Tim, Joanie and Sandy. Mark was sadly killed in an accident, and Dixie found herself widowed at age 52.
“It’s bad to lose a husband and a child, but you have to go on,” she said.
Dixie “went on” and found new love in a former high school sweetheart, and joy pursuing her art and participating in her grandchildren’s lives and then later, her great-grandchildren lives.
Today, she has 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, and has been married “very happily” to second husband Gordon Bill for 21 years.
Dixie’s artwork has traveled throughout the United States, and to England, Japan and Canada. Her whimsical figures have found their way onto quilt blocks, wine labels and even a fertilizer bag. And most recently, a number of her prints have had reproduction rights sold to be used on hats, totes, dishes and cups.
The September ARTrails is when Dixie throws open the doors of her studio to the public, although visitors are welcome throughout the year, if they call ahead.
“I think I have over 255 different prints, and heaven knows how many originals I have done. Nowadays, it takes me a month to do an original and I used to do three a month.”
“I still like to sketch and watch what comes out of the pencil,” she says. “I have so many books of whimsical sketches, I could paint for the rest of my life. I will never have enough time do them all.”
For Dixie, her beloved sketchbooks are the most valuable thing she owns.
“They are more valuable to me than the original oils,” she said. “Because this is the first thing that comes out of my head. I curl up for hours and sketch, and erase those lines, and sketch some more.”
