Born in 1943 in Kansas City, Missouri, Bob Dick holds a Bachelor of Science in education and a Masters in American history from Central Missouri State University. He has also completed graduate work in French history and economics at the University of Missouri in Columbia. In addition, Bob has also done work at Harvard, Yale, Columbia and at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France.
Bob is an accomplished artist in various mediums who is difficult to categorize. He is at home in a number of different styles including impressionism, abstractionism and realism. He is a sculptor who works in bronze as well as in wood. As a painter he works comfortably in both oil and water color. Bob also creates work in charcoals and pastels. With very little formal art education, some collectors call him a folk artist, others an unrepentant artistic renegade with little regard for formality or style.
However, if there is one undisputed fact about Bob, it is that he is obsessed with interpreting what he sees or what he feels. He has always seemed driven to re-fashion his world. His art is literally life energy made visible. His reality is his drawings, paintings and bronzes. His sketchbooks are his camera and they are packed with stenographic drawings and studies that range from anatomy to animals to insects to landscapes to whatever strikes his fancy at the moment.
Bobís work has been included in numerous one-man and group shows as well as in corporate and museum collections. Among his exhibitions are at the American Legacy Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri and at McCaughen and Burr Fine Arts in Webster Groves, Missouri. He has also exhibited at The Monday Club in Webster Groves, the Missouri Athletic Club in St. Louis, Missouri, the Mark Twain Summer Institute, and the United Missouri Bank in Kirkwood, Missouri.
He is a member of the Salmagund Club of New York, the Pastel Society of the Southwest and the Greater St. Louis Archeological Society. Together with Scott Kerr he is the co-author of An American Art Colony: The Art and Artists of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri 1930-1940.
