Audrey Dygert

Audrey Dygert (1922 to 2010) signed her paintings A. Dygert and pressed a small red seal beside the name, a Chinese convention that points straight to her teacher. Born Audrey Harper and raised in the East Bay, she painted for half a century in three very different places: the oak hills and old towns around Walnut Creek, the Gulf Coast of Texas, and finally the mountain town of Truckee, California, where she and her husband ran a gallery called ArtTruckee on Commercial Row. Our two prints are her Truckee in winter, the town's main street under snow, published as limited editions and sold from that gallery.

The East Bay and Jade Fon

The Concord Transcript introduced her in July 1967 as one of three well-known Diablo Valley artists showing in the Martinez Library's revolving art display. She was a native Californian who had studied art in high school and at the University of California at Berkeley, and she lived in Walnut Creek. Her real training came from Jade Fon, the California watercolourist whose workshops at Asilomar on the Monterey Peninsula shaped a generation of California painters. She studied with him for four years in a course at Diablo Valley College, in charcoal, pastel and watercolour, and for three summers attended his Asilomar workshop. There she also worked under Ralph Baker, Harold Gretzner, Vernon Nye, Mary MacDonald Roberts and Jane Burnham, and she took private lessons from Don Osterloh, Lundy Siegriest and Pam Della. It is a roll call of the California watercolour movement.

The paper described her style as bold, with heavy use of colour, and noted her interest in local landmarks, many of them soon to be restored or destroyed: an old mineral mine, the old church in Dublin. She also painted pastel portraits at home, and had been accepted in juried shows at Diablo Valley College, the Alameda County Fair and the Concord Art Association.

Houston and the Gulf Coast

By the 1970s the family had moved to Texas. In November 1975 the Houston Chronicle announced that Audrey Dygert, Houston watercolourist, had opened a one-week show of more than eighty watercolours at Nell's Frame Shop and Gallery in Baytown. She preferred transparent watercolour almost to the exclusion of every other medium, had been painting seriously for fifteen years, had won top awards, and was well known around the Gulf Coast. She belonged to the Southwest Watercolor Society, the Shoreline Art League, the Clear Creek Art League and the Houston Art League, was an associate of the American Watercolor Society, hung in galleries in La Porte, Houston and Baytown, had been artist of the month at the Crow's Nest Gallery, had been commissioned by Zapata and Shell Oil, and gave demonstrations of her technique around Houston and the Bay Area.

In October 1983 the Houston Post social column described the party that opened her show at the Archway Gallery. It was a big hit at the cash register, and the paintings included a series she had done while backpacking in Wyoming's Wind River Range.

ArtTruckee, Commercial Row

Truckee is where the story settles. ArtTruckee was trading by July 1981, when it appears among the local businesses thanking the Nevada County Arts Council, and through the 1980s it served as a registration point for the North Tahoe Fine Arts Council photography show and a ticket outlet for Music at Sand Harbor. The label on the back of one of our prints gives its address: Limited Editions by A. Dygert, available at ArtTruckee, 10054 Commercial Row, Truckee, California. Dealer biographies record that Audrey and her husband retired to Truckee, where she exhibited and managed the gallery with him. The gallery sat on the very street in her pictures.

Truckee was changing fast around them. In 1991 the Sacramento Bee described a town losing its forest to shopping centres and parking lots, its population up by more than half in a decade. The Commercial Row Dygert painted, with its brick hotel fronts, false-front stores and drifts of snow at the kerb, was the old Truckee that the newcomers came to see. She kept showing into her eighties: in October 2005 the Vrooman Fine Art Gallery on Donner Pass Road in Truckee was showing the works of Audrey Dygert.

Why Dygert Matters

Dygert is a link between two worlds that rarely meet on a gallery wall: the California watercolour school of the 1950s and 1960s, with its Chinese brush discipline and bold, wet colour, and the small town mountain gallery of the 1980s. Her Truckee prints are souvenirs in the best sense, made by someone who lived on the street, knew its buildings, and painted them with forty years of training behind every stroke.