Lucy Diecks

Lucy McGowan Diecks was a dedicated high school teacher who created both realistic figure paintings and surrealistic abstractions. Except when she was pursuing her education as an artist, she lived exclusively in her birth town, Louisville, Kentucky.

Diecks' interest in art was nurtured by her parents and teachers from a young age. Her earliest art classes were at Louisville Girls' High School, where she graduated from in 1925. She then spent four years at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, probably at the same time Gladys Nelson Smith was also studying with Richard S. Meryman. In 1929 Diecks began her teaching career at J.M. Atherton High School where she remained for thirty years. Initially it was an all-girls school, but became co-educational in 1950, twelve years before her retirement.

For six summers, Diecks went to Syracuse University in upstate New York and eventually obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. During the summer of 1944 she took instruction from Boardman Robinson at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center in Colorado, and another summer she was at The Summer School for Painting in Saugatuck, Michigan, familiarly known as Ox-Bow, where instructors were affiliated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1948 she took lessons from Juro Kubicek, an artist from Berlin, Germany, who was teaching at the University of Louisville. He worked in a Surrealist manner that clearly influenced Diecks.

Apparently as a result of her experience with Kubicek, she began introducing the concept of abstraction to her high school students. In a local newspaper article entitled "Art Can Be Work But It's Fun," she explained that "some of [the students] take to it like [a] duck to water. Some of them never catch on. But they all learn the problem—that's to take aspects from nature and organize and recreate them, still retaining the essence of what you're working from." Her students clearly took her instruction to heart. One student, Mary Neely, who is now a professional artist herself, once recalled her instructor's reserved, thoughtful countenance in an interview. According to Neely, "Ms. Diecks" was very intentional with the technical and theoretical tools she provided, making sure every student felt comfortable and prepared to let their imagination run free.

In addition to her teaching at the high school, Diecks conducted classes at the local Art Center. For several years she served as one of its directors. She was an active exhibitor with the Art Center Association as well at the Speed Art Museum where on one occasion her paintings were on view along with works by Dorothy Kohlhepp and her husband Norman Kohlhepp. All three also exhibited at the Kentucky State Fair where she often won prizes. Diecks regularly oversaw exhibitions of her students' work and conducted plein-air classes for them during the summer.

On Wednesday evenings, Diecks participated with a group of aspiring amateur painters and sculptors. She connected with two women who frequently spent summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and through them her work was included twice (1951 and 1952) in exhibitions hosted by the Provincetown Art Association where pieces by Blanche Lazzell are likewise listed in the accompanying brochure. In 1962 Diecks made a trip to Provincetown where she painted the seascape. Once the summer was over, she opined that she would have liked to have done more, "but it takes a while to get the feeling of a place."