Dean Mitchell was always drawing pictures. He sold his paintings and drawings as a youngster, professionally since he was 23.
Now 52, he won the top prize at the Southern Watercolor Society’s members exhibit in Columbus on June 6.
“I sold works to people when I was in junior high for 50 bucks, 75 bucks,” Mitchell said.
Growing up in Quincy, a small, rural town in the Florida panhandle, he didn’t know that he could make a living as an artist.
“When I was coming around, I had a junior high school teacher who encouraged me to paint,” he said. That teacher (Tom Harris) was his guest at the SWS reception and awards ceremony in Columbus.
Mitchell was one of the first black artists to win the awards.
With the encouragement of teachers like Harris and others, his big breakthrough was an art show in Panama City.
Mitchell was first represented by Zoltan Bush in his Panama City art gallery, the Bay Art and Frame. Mitchell’s first solo exhibit was around the time he won the North Florida Fair art show.
“I took a Trailways bus to Panama City and stayed at his house,” he remembered. “When I got to the gallery, there were people lined for three blocks.”
After college, Mitchell worked at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City for three years. He left the company, but stayed in Kansas City for 25 years until recently moving to Tampa.
That’s when he decided to try to make art a career.
“I started entering all these juried shows,” Mitchell said. “It’s so important as an American painter to have art be judged on its own merit. In a juried show, it doesn’t matter where you went to school, your background, your race. It’s neutral territory.
“So I put my work out there, judged by people who were peers. It’s a fair way of assessing work. It worked out for me.”
He won the Hubbard Award for Excellence that was worth $250,000. He was the only African-American artist in that show.
Even with all the accolades and prizes, Mitchell still feels that he’s an outsider. So he feels comfortable in Tampa. It’s big enough, yet not New York City, where he’s been urged to move.
“I can move where I want to move,” he said. “I like a more slower pace. New York City is so expensive to work there and to live there. And there are a lot of distractions.”
His family is still baffled by his success.
“They can hardly believe it,” he said with a laugh. “They thought I’d wind up back home and my mother was going to have to take care of me. It’s incomprehensible to my mother. She’s always saying, ‘I can’t believe people pay that much for your pictures.’ They’re still slightly uncomfortable; they’re real.”
By Sandra Okamoto
Posted By: Daniel Moss
Monday, June 22nd 2009 at 6:02PM
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