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Alice Grace, an 84-year-old multidisciplinary artist, is celebrating a lifetime of creative
legacy, August 5 – 30, at The Portal at TSA featuring an astonishing array of mediums
including quilting, doll making, acrylic and oil painting, ceramic figures, wood carving,
and button making.
Meet Alice Grace
Grace began drawing and painting maps when she was in the 9 th Grade in Louisiana.
Her biography states that she started creating the maps for her classmates, and it
sparked her life-long journey of creative expression. A natural artist, she’s completely
self-taught, though you’d never know it looking at the painting of a young girl seated on
a stone wall, shading herself with a blue umbrella to match her light blue dress. The
warm, sunny yellow that fills most of the piece radiates from the canvas drawing the
viewer in, evoking the kind of day so lovely the painting can barely contain it. Grace
herself is a bundle of positivity even when joking about this show being her “last hurrah.”
Says Grace, “I decided a year ago I needed to do something, maybe my last hurrah
(laughs), and then I think, anyway, don’t say it’s the last.” Grace told her artist
representative, Audry, “I really want to do a one-woman-show. I want people to see all
my work. Last month Audry called me and said, ‘we’re ready’ and I said, I’m ready too!”
Inspiration
There’s a beautiful, quilted piece featuring a similar yellow seen in the painting of the
young girl with an umbrella. This one features a different woman in a red dress dotted
with blue flowers and white pocket. Again, it’s Grace’s sense of color — deep, jewel
tones, that feel like they’re from a specific time and place — that draw you in. Whoever
the woman is, there’s a sense she’s important to the artist. Standing at a wooden gate,
chickens at her feet, a house in the background with a white rocking chair lightly painted
in front giving a feeling of home. Grace confirms the woman in the quilt is her aunt. “We
would go in the country to visit her. It was a long walk, and she would always walk us to
the fence when we left. Standing there at the gate, that’s my memory of her.”
She says that much of her work is about the people and places in her life that had
meaning for her. “Even if it was something negative, I always try to put a positive in.
When I really get into a project it has to be just so, and I try to be as realistic as
possible.” Grace learned quilting from her grandmother who was known for her skill.
“People would bring my grandmother pieces of their clothing and other fabric scraps
that held meaning for them and she would make them the most beautiful quilts.”
Creativity Made Me an Artist
In the 1980s, Grace felt she wanted to make something artistic, so she started out
learning how to silk screen and making t-shirts to sell. The shirts sold well, but Grace
felt she wanted to do something more personal. As she explains, “There were so many
people doing the same thing. I went into my own head for ideas, I learned to be
creative, and that creativity made me an artist.” Grace tried all kinds of media until she
discovered what was satisfying to her. As a self-taught artist she researched through
books anything she wanted to do. “I’m constantly creating and wanting to evolve,
moving from one project to the next.” Her studio contains a lot of beautiful plants that
inspire her. “I see so much of God in nature, and I look at the colors and design of
plants and think God is an awesome God to create with so much beauty. That’s where I
get a lot of my feelings and ideas from. The first thing I do when I get up in the morning
is open the curtains and let all that sunshine in. That’s what that yellow means to me, it’s
the beauty of the world.”
