Helen Bickham is a Mexican artist, from Eurasian with American parents who began painting professionally later in life. She was born in Harbin, moving to the United States during World War II. She lived in Europe for a while but settled in Mexico in 1962 after visiting the country. She began drawing at the age of six, drawing and painting non-professionally until 1975 when she considers her career to have begun. She has had seventy individual exhibitions, participated in over 300 collective ones and has been a member of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana since 1997. Her work is figurative, generally one or more figures on one or more landscapes, and described as introspective, with the aim of conveying a feeling or mood rather than a person or object.
Life
Helen Bickham was born on June 9, 1935, in Harbin, Manchuria at the time of Japanese occupation. Her mother, Nadezna Ivanofnof Rachoak, was from a mixed Ukrainian/Asian family, and her maternal grandfather worked for the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Her father, Howard Montgomery, was an American officer with the U.S. Navy, who died in World War II when Bickham was only eight. Before his death, her mother and she left China for the United States, arriving just before the attack on Pearl Harbor
Bickham grew up in various parts of the United States as an only child. She and her mother had a difficult time adjusting to life in the United States. Her mother did not speak English and worked menial jobs such as sewing and housecleaning, socializing with other Euro-Asian refugees who spoke Russian. She was home alone a lot as a child, spending most of her time reading and drawing because her mother had to work.
Caught between cultures as a child, she often found herself as a lonely observer, drawing what she saw as early as age six. She remembers that as a child, the other children would often ask her to draw things for them such as a “mommy” or a “doctor.” If they did not specify, she would draw figures without clothes, like paper dolls, to add them later, but this caused one of the mothers to call her a “degenerate.” Her mother did not encourage her art; however, she did receive some support for her art at school. While she was in elementary school in Virginia, she was often excused from class to draw murals in the hall, usually with themes such as Thanksgiving, done on butcher paper.
She was also an inquisitive child and young adult often not satisfied with the answers provided by her family and religion. Although neither her mother nor her stepfather thought that university was appropriate for girls, she managed to go to the University of California, Berkeley on scholarship. There, she took classes simply because someone stated that they were the hardest, with classes in every discipline, as the university system allowed students to design their own majors. She decided on American civilization as she was an immigrant and wanted to understand the ideas of Europe brought over to the continent by the original settlers. She did not major in art, but she took an art appreciation class. This class had an assignment of creating a watercolor, and Bickham's desire to get the image just right caused the professor to comment that she was an artist. She was also required to visit a museum in San Francisco, a task she started grudgingly. However, after she saw her first real Édouard Manet painting, instead of a reproduction, she stood transfixed and returned home happy to show her ticket stub to her professor. She married in the late fifties and had her first son, Geoffrey just before the family left for Europe.
When she lived in Florence, Italy, she had a landlady was a painter. She also had a chance to see many famous art pieces in their original spending much of her time in Europe in the museums of Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. She returned to the United States, where her second son, Brett, was born. She lived outside of Indianapolis, painting landscapes and still lifes.(revelation) At this time she met painter Bill Majors. He saw Bickham's watercolors saying she painted them as if they were oils and bought her a set of oil paints. In 1962, she went to Mexico for a six-week vacation. While she was gone, one of her friends in Indiana took three paintings from her home to enter in an art competition for her. These three were chosen to compete as part of a group of 600 from 6,000 and all three won prizes.