URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2015_Melissa-McCarthy

What Do Artists Do by Paul Kandarian

Bob Dilworth’s weathered face erupts into a smile at the mention of “The Naked Lady” he once painted as a boy.

But that’s been Dilworth’s life, drawing outside the lines, thinking outside the box, all reflected in his work that has been shown at URI, locally and nationally. “Always have a cause,” he says. “Even if you don’t know where you’re going.” Dilworth grew up in the tiny, largely African-American town of Lawrenceville, Va., which he says was isolated and insular in many ways. “One of my childhood friends said we grew up in Camelot and didn’t know it,” he says. “Everything was there. We weren’t rich, we weren’t poor, but I didn’t think we were missing out. It was a really happy time.” Dilworth received his bachelor of fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1973, and his master in fine

“I always knew I was an artist, and artists do what? They paint naked ladies,” laughs Dilworth, a University of Rhode Island (URI) art professor, as he sits in his Providence, R.I. studio surrounded by trays of paint, cans of brushes, and stacks of huge paintings leaning on walls, all works in progress. “I thought innocently it was a work of art, that I was doing something wonderful.” Dilworth’s teacher thought otherwise. She sent the nervous third grader to the principal’s office. “She saw it as a) I was not paying attention,” he says, “and b) I was drawing naked ladies.”

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