About

Alison Dibble is a retired ecologist and conservation biologist living in Maine, U.S.A. She paints landscapes and seascapes in a loose, impressionistic style, and figures (people and animals), still life subjects, and abstract works. She interprets what is in front of her, and she imagines what is not.

Dibble has been making art all her life. Indeed her first teacher was her mother, Barbara Coan, a painter, who taught her to paint. As a teenager she attended a summer program at the Boston Museum of Fine Art School, then earned a B.A. in English Literature at Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY. She married and raised a family, and also earned her M.S. in Botany and Ph.D. in Plant Science at the University of Maine, Orono. She worked as an ecologist for 30 years, researching rare plants, forest fire fuels and invasive plants, forest ecology, and pollinators especially native bees of Maine. She retired in 2021. Her art teachers have included not only her mother Barbara Coan, but also Roberta Griffith, Louise Bourne, Frank Sullivan, Amy Hosa, Donald Demers, Jerry Rose, Tom Curry, Olena Babak, and Marsha Donahue. She can hear their voices in her head while she paints, still guiding and inspiring her.

Alison Dibble’s process is to concentrate on bold design above other aspects of the painting. She often starts with brief sketches and value studies to work out what she wants the painting to say. It’s about an emotion…but how to translate an emotion into the language of paint? Once she has her ideas worked out (and typically not a detailed sketch), and a plan for a limited palette (just a handfull of colors, usually) she starts in with the paint: midvalues, then darks, paying attention to the shapes, then a few flourishes with a smaller brush. She paints quickly. She must adjust to this new thing in the world. She leans a new painting up in her studio and stares at it, possibly tweaks it a bit, but usually it is all but completed in a short time.

She might think of the painting as mostly completed, but is it ready for the world to see? Sometimes it takes her years, yes, YEARS, to call a piece “finished”. She has to think about it, sneak up on it, try it in dim light indoors, or out in the dooryard in full sun. She has to squint at it, and consider again, over and over.

It is Alison’s particular pleasure to share her art with the world through this web page. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of her paintings goes to nonprofits in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Mongolia, or in eastern Cuba. A special thank you to friends who partner with her in these endeavors; we are making a difference.