2010 AJC stories: Artist’s ‘big break’ brings more shows, new visions

The temperature was in the mid-30s. The artist was in her mid-80s. Neither fact was going to keep Elsie Dresch away from her easel this month.

Age and freak accidents already had proved unworthy adversaries for the Atlantan, whose idea for marking her 85th birthday — a one-woman show featuring 85 new paintings — was chronicled here last March.

Just after finishing No. 84, she slipped and broke her right “painting” wrist. Dresch shrugged it off and, summoning the ghost of a long-ago art school exercise, painted No. 85 with her left hand.

In the process, she also touched a nerve. Hundreds packed the show’s opening night at Atlanta’s Watson Gallery, among them friends and fans. But there were also dozens of unfamiliar faces — people who’d heard about the painter’s determination not to 86 her grand plan and who wanted a look at her work in the flesh.

The attention hasn’t let up. Since March, Dresch has been in two more shows and spoken to church and civic groups. Inspired by her, another painter staged a “45 for 45” show.

Her right wrist fully functional now, Dresch is testing a new technique she calls “Softer Edges.” In her home studio is a new landscape, “Mist on the Water,” its dreamlike quality suggestive of something even more promising on the horizon.

“I like to give myself a problem,” Dresch said. “Sometimes, I just need to feel like I’m doing something different.”