Meet the Family of Artists: Jed Dorsey

Jed was born in 1976, during a ten year stretch where his dad Jack Dorsey, was supporting the family as a full-time artist.  As the youngest (April is 4 years old and Jason 7 years older), Jed was much loved.

From an early age his was encouraged by his mom, Ann, and dad to sketch and provided the materials to do so.

But Jed, who was athletically gifted who excelled at football and especially baseball, was more interested in sports than art.

Still art was always a part of his life. One example was that was his participation in the Dorsey Family Art Booth at the Stanwood-Camano Fair.

In 1987 Ann, seeing what it cost to send the kids to college came up with the idea to sell his art, and the art of other family members, at the Stanwood-Camano Fair that runs each August. Her vision was to use their pickup truck as the booth, hang art off the sides, and hope that the many nice people and friends of the family would stop and purchase a piece or two. Jack designed and built the portable “Dorsey Art Gallery” which could be found at the “Best Lil’ Fair in the West” for the next five years. Ann was right: many of the Dorsey’s family and friends, and the nice people of the Stanwood-Camano area, supported them in this family effort. Ann remembers the father of Jed’s friend Eric Hughes, Dr. Hughes, a dentist, bought a couple of Jed’s paintings at the fair each summer. “It was a great encouragement to Jed.”

Jed’s life as an artist was to blossom after he married his beautiful Canadian wife, Renae. On a trip to Whistler, British Columbia, in 2001 they stumbled on some galleries showing vibrant oil and acrylic paintings. That very week during their vacation he bought his first acrylic paints and spent hours painting in this new medium. He loved it, and thus began the journey that would result in his following his father’s path as a full-time artist.

Jed discovered that he had an eye for design, light and color in his acrylic paintings. His early paintings show the striking, even epic, style that would emerge.

In 2011, after spending ten years in Vancouver, BC, where Jed worked full-time as a house-painter and part-time as a church worship leader, Jed and Renae moved to Indianapolis. Their daughter Willow was born in 2012. Jed helped at the church Jason pastored, worked as a house painter and then as a Young Life leader before he launched out as a full-time artist in 2016.

Jed is rapidly becoming known as an artist who captures the beauty of nature in urban landscapes. 

Jed not only is a gifted artist but an inspiring teacher. Students have fun in his workshops and flourish under his warm encouragement and coaching.

Jed’s art is being collected by people from Canada to Indiana to Washington and beyond. He paints places that people love.

 

Here’s a recent video about Jed: https://vimeo.com/album/3012615/video/140340802

You can view more of Jed’s art at www.jeddorseyart.com.

Five Generations of Artists: Meet April Nelson

April Nelson is the daughter of Jack and Ann Dorsey, Granddaughter of Sayre Dodgson and great Granddaughter of Fanny Y. Cory.

April as a baby surrounded by her mom (Ann), Grandma Sayre, and Great Grandma, FY Cory. 

She was raised on beautiful Camano Island with her older brother Jason and younger brother Jed. Growing up they played imaginary games for hour upon hour and creativity blossomed.

Growing up in a family of artists gave April a wonderful opportunity to be exposed to fine art at a young age.

This exposure created an interest in and an appreciation for the arts, namely painting and drawing.  As the years went by, April pursued this natural interest by reading books and taking classes and workshops from many great artists whose works she admired.  Through the years, she has appreciated input from family members who enjoy giving a friendly art critique on paintings in progress.  To share the enjoyment and pursuit of creating art with her family has been a lifelong joy.

Five Generations of Artists: Meet Sayre Cooney Dodgson

Agnes Sayre Cooney was born in 1907 to Fred and Fanny Cooney (Five Generations of Artists: Meet Fanny Y. Cory).  From infancy she was called by her middle name, Sayre.

Later the family was joined by brothers Bob and Ted.  Their home was a ranch of 1,800 acres in western Montana on the Missouri River, a few miles from the small town of Canyon Ferry.

Photo: Sayre with her mom and brothers on the ranch in Montana

Sayre’s nationally famous artist mother, Fanny Y. Cory, encouraged Sayre to draw and felt she had great artistic talent.

Photo: A drawing of Sayre’s when she was 12 years old

A dream was born that someday Sayre would go to a good art school and receive further training.

Photo: Sayre talking to her mother, Fanny Y. Cory.

In 1929 – 1930 this dream came true.  Fanny Y. Cory accompanied 22 year old Sayre from Montana to Pennsylvania and the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Sayre began her official schooling as an artist.   She completed several years of training there.

Photo: Sayre at art school in Philadelphia with some of her classmates.

However, Sayre was caught in a changing time in art where “modern art” was admired at the Academy and traditional art was looked on as lesser.   Sayre was a traditional artist whose strong talents lay in being able to artistically render any subject she saw.

So she didn’t feel at home at art school nor was she an artist/illustrator artist like her mother who could make things come alive from her imagination.  Sayre needed to see what she was drawing.  Somewhere during this time,  her brother (finding it impossible  to not compare his sister’s art with that of their mother’s) said, “Sayre, you have talent, but not genius.”

Photo: Sayre  on her trip home to Montana after leaving art school stopped to see the sites in NYC.

During this time of uncertainty in her life, Sayre read a book about Hull House in Chicago where Jane Addams made a huge impact on the needs of people there.  She decided she wanted to do something with her life where she was helping people.  Sayre chose to become a nurse and that is just what she did. The day she graduated as a nurse, she married medical doctor, Thomas Dodgson and they began a new life together.

Art became an enjoyable sideline which she used occasionally in her everyday life, one example being the drawings she made in the journals she kept documenting each of their four children.

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Photo: Sayre’s drawings of her daughter Margaret. 

Sayre threw herself into parenting raising her and Doc’s four children: Margaret, Thomas (Bud), Robert and Ann. In 1947 they moved from Moroni, Utah to a 30 acre farm on Camano Island where Sayre nurtured her growing family and kept the bustling household thriving.

Fanny Y. Cory, or “Meetsy” as her family called her moved to Camano Island in 1952. Sayre was a founding member with her mother of the  “Grunt and Groan Club” where family members of all ages painted small “alla prima” watercolors together as they visited at Fanny’s house.

Even though Sayre did not pursue a career in the arts she was a lover of beauty, especially of  art, music and poems. She always wanted to hear a song or a poem. And she knew many poems by heart. Her daughter Ann learned her first poem, The Daffodils by William Wordswoth, when she was braiding her hair each day.  Ann grew to love the poem, and many others, because her mom loved it. Sayre passed down this love for poems by giving her children and grandchildren the book 101 Famous Poems, most of which she knew by heart.

And though Sayre couldn’t carry a tune (any musical ability her kids had came from her husband, Doc Dodgson) she loved singing, songs, and she wanted to hear what her loved ones could do along that line and never wearied of being their best listener.

In short, Sayre was a wonderful supporter and encourager of art and creativity in her children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. She purchased paintings from Ann for $15 and gave them as wedding gifts; she also bought paintings from her grandchildren, giving them their first taste of their art being valued by someone!

Photo: One of Ann’s art/calligraphy pieces that Sayre purchased.

 

When she was elderly and being cared for by her children, grandchildren and their spouses, the “Grunt and Groan club” was revived in her home. Grandchildren painted, songs were played, poems recited and creativity blossomed.

Sayre was a beautiful combination of Scottish hard work and frugality and the Irish love of beauty and creativity. She was neat, hardworking, diligent on one side of her and a lover of beauty in every form on the other side of her.  On top of that, Ann swears on a stack of Bibles, that she can’t remember even one time of hearing her complain or show self pity.  She walked in beauty and thankfulness.

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Sayre died at the ripe old age of 104, beloved, surrounded by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, having left a legacy of art and poems and music that lives on in the generations that followed her.

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