Mary Clare Dix - Founder of Atelier Dix and Under-19s Rugby Coach

Portrait and interview - 1994

Mary Clare’s childhood was spent in Iraq – mainly in Basra - from where, during the war, she was evacuated with her mother and sister, to India.  She was educated by her mother until the age of eleven, when she returned to England to a boarding school in Westmorland.

At seventeen, she ‘discovered’ and fell in love with the Continent, especially France and Italy, and wallowed in the Early Renaissance of Florence all that summer. Six years later, she graduated in Fine Art from Leeds College of Art.  William Coldstream offered her a post-graduated at the Slade but, after struggling as a student with no grant for five years, she declined!

For three years, Mary Clare was on the staff of the Fine Art Department of Newcastle-upon-Tyne College of Art and Industrial Design, taking Pre-Diploma students for drawing, painting and liberal studies.  She married Harrison Dix, a painter, also on the staff.

Later, whilst in London where Harrison was teaching at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in Bedford Square, she decided that their two young children should be brought up in a rural area onto which they would ‘happily graft their childhood memories.’  When Leonard Elmhirst invited Harrison to teach at Dartington Hall College, they found the idyllic place for young children to grow up.  They lived in Park Road, by the Hall for many years and Mary Clare taught History of Art and Architecture to A’ Level students at Dartington Hall School.

Moving into Totnes, Mary Clare taught painting in Adult Education classes in Dartington, Totnes and Dartmouth for many years, before deciding to open her own studio at home.  For the past six years, she has held classes three days a week in Atelier Dix.  The work is a ‘happy diversity of media and genres.  Through the winter months, I occasionally introduce models, or sometimes give a series of art history slide lectures during lunch breaks.  In the summer, we paint outside, either here or in favoured spots!  Some of the thirty or so painters have been with me for ten or twelve years, and they have become a strong group of painters who exhibit each summer in the town, as well as a very supportive group of friends.’

Mary Clare’s other great love is rugby.  Enjoying all sport and completing in her youth in athletics, tennis and swimming, she feels that the single most interesting game is rugby football and that was the one she therefore offered to help with.  She has managed the Totnes RFC (under 19s) for seventeen years, and the under 16s for four of those years. It was a bit of a phenomenon to start with and I know that my opposite numbers in clubs around Devon, all men, referred to me as Boadicea, but eventually I was accepted.

I get very involved with people, and then stick with them, thinking that I can help them to progress.  Given that most of my Atelier Dix painters are women, and that anyone over forty is old to young children, I quite accepted the truth of what my children used to say:  Mary Clare’s friends are all old ladies or young boys!

Update: Now grown up, her son Jonas lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he plays rugby for the Kiwi Hawthorns, last year’s champion of Victoria and for the State of Victoria, and her daughter Sophie is an actress living in London.