MILTON — Dee Christie taught high school art in St. Albans for more than three decades. In 2024, she was named Vermont Art Teacher of the Year.
2024 was also her last year in the classroom. She left to focus on her own art: making colorful collages out of old books.
[So this is my studio. It’s full of random stuff that I have to go through and figure out what I’m going to do with, because I don’t need all this stuff…]
Dee Christie: My name is Dee Christie. I am a freelance artist at this point in the game. And I used to be a teacher, an art teacher, for 35 years. And I just quit that job and became this artist.
[My brother got this typewriter, I had it at school forever. It’s fun, right? Somebody gave this to me. So the ink is wearing out, but you can type…]
My father was an artist. He was what I would consider an ‘outsider artist.’ You know what that is? So an outsider artist is someone who doesn’t have any formal training. So he would be tarring the roof, you know, like, tar paper, ripping it off. And then he’d see an image in it, and he’d staple it on the wall. So he’s always had that creative side to him, so I think I got that from him.
[I bought all these books, and it’s, what, four bookshelves full of random books that I had at school, that when I left school, they had to come with me. They didn’t want them…]
So as a teacher, as an art teacher in high school, kids don’t like to use white pages in a sketchbook. They’re too precious, and they want to keep it pristine, and they don’t want to ruin their page. So I was like, ‘Let’s go get these books that they’re throwing out, let’s start painting in these books.’ And so we started.
And I did it with them, because I have a philosophy that I don’t make anybody do anything I wouldn’t do. So I started, I think it was 2015, so it’s been 10 years, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna do art every day in my book.’
[So you can kind of see where some of them are good, some of them were not, like, this kind of gets washed out…]
I wasn’t planning on selling any of these. So some of them came out great, and some of them didn’t. But I felt like it was time to see what I could do with it. And it just made me feel good to do art every day.
[So this is called the junk journal. This is kind of fun. You just find stuff and you put it together, and it doesn’t have to have any purpose at all. But then you sew it together. This is like an old calendar…]
So Brandon was my stepson that was killed in a car accident 20 years ago.
He got out of the service, and he stayed in South Carolina, which is where he was stationed. And he was going to school, and he was doing all these things. He was taking acting lessons and singing lessons, and I feel like he was living as much as he could in a short period of time. And like looking back, that’s how it felt to me.
And then he was in a car accident. He and his buddy died. It was just an accident. There was no drinking involved. Just too fast, bad timing, old car. And that was a defining moment in our lives. And he was my stepson, but he was my only kid as well.
[I have a picture of him. I wish I knew where it was, because you get a kick out of it. It’s a Polaroid my mom took, and he’s sitting in a snowbank…]
Almost from that moment on, I stopped doing things I didn’t want to do. Like, I was always going to go down to see him when he was at school, and he died before I could do that. And so I was like, I’m not going to wait to go visit people and go see things. And so that’s been part of my experience, is just, ‘do,’ you know?
You have two choices in this life. Every day you can wake up and be miserable, or you can wake up and get through something. And so you have to choose. You have to choose to make your life better, to make your days better, and to be good.