Myrtle Beach artist, 86, to have work displayed at art museum

When she was a little girl, Dixie Dugan knew she was an artist.

Now, at 86, she is a popular artist, lecturer and teacher who continues to create works of art at her Myrtle Beach home.

“She’s really just extraordinary,” said Patricia Goodwin, executive director of the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, where Dugan’s art will be exhibited from Sept. 21 through Dec. 28.

The exhibit, titled “Dixie Dugan: A Retrospective,” contains 65 pieces of art.

Since she started counting them in 1973, Dugan has painted 2,028 pieces. But she painted many more before that.

Sitting on the curb, she painted Peaches Corner, a local landmark, at least 15 times in the 1960s and ’70s.

Some of her paintings are of places that are now gone, including the Pavilion and Sloppy Joe’s.

She painted Sloppy Joe’s from the curb and then painted the inside for its owners while sitting on the bar.

She has painted portraits, landscapes, nudes, flowers, butterflies, tobacco barns, piers, sand dunes, sea oats, geishas, cats and much more.

Dugan was born in Kansas and recalls her childhood during the Great Depression. She remembers the dust storms, the invasion of grasshoppers that stripped crops and standing in line for dried peas, dried eggs and other food that tasted awful but kept her and her family alive.

When she was 6 years old and in the first grade, she and her classmates painted individual pictures in school. One of those paintings will be in the upcoming exhibit, and she painted it with her hands, using tempura paint, flour and water.

“We were finger-painting before finger-painting came out, but we were doing it because we didn’t have brushes,” she said.

Maybe they could have used toothbrushes, but that was unlikely if they were fortunate enough to have one instead of having to brush their teeth with twigs, using baking soda or soap as toothpaste.

“If you had a toothbrush, you kept it,” said Dugan, whose family moved to Chicago while she was still a girl.

“Moving to Chicago was the best thing in the world for us because we were starving to death,” she said.

On Dec. 7, 1941, she was lying on the floor listening to an orchestra on the radio for a school assignment. The music stopped, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor was announced.

“I thought Pearl Harbor was a woman. I asked my mother if it hurt her,” Dugan said. “My mother started crying because she had four brothers. She knew they’d be going to war.”

Dugan’s four uncles did go to war, and they all came home.

The war was another time of increased shortage and using ration books for things such as gas, tires, sugar, coffee and more.

“Everything was rationed,” Dugan said.

By the time Dugan was in the third grade, she had started bartering with her classmates, trading her artistic talent for pencils, lunches or whatever they had to trade.

She was dyslectic but didn’t know that was what affected her learning. She used her artistic abilities to overcome by creating maps, bulletin boards and posters for her teachers, and that is what got her through high school, she said.

At 14, she bumped into a sailor while standing in line to get tickets at a skating rink. She had painted soldiers and sailors on her skate-box. It was snowing, and the damp paint rubbed off on his uniform. She told him that if he would go to her house, her mother would clean it for him.

Although she wasn’t old enough to be allowed to date him yet, that was the beginning of a lasting relationship with Tommy Dugan, her husband.

He served on the USS Intrepid throughout the war. They married not long after the war was over and Dixie was 18. Tommy went to college, got a degree and was recruited by the government to teach airplane mechanics.

They were living in Louisiana with their two daughters when Dixie told them that she wanted to concentrate on her art. Tommy gave her 10 years before she would have to “get back in the kitchen.”

When she sold her first painting for $35, she took her family out to dinner, “and I haven’t been back in the kitchen yet,” she said.

In 1966, Tommy was assigned to teach jet mechanics at the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, and they moved to Myrtle Beach.

She studied art, art history and related subjects at Coastal Carolina University and the University of South Carolina.

Dugan has not only managed to make money and stay out of the kitchen while doing something she loves, but she has won numerous awards and created a collection of art that is treasured by many people.

“Art is not my hobby,” she said. “It is my life.”

This story was originally published September 13, 2014 at 5:15 PM with the headline "Myrtle Beach artist, 86, to have work displayed at art museum."