Ask artist Alice Moseley what she wishes for and she’ll say “to be 75 again.” Ask her what she thinks about her incredible popularity and you’ll get, “Well, I’m 89; they better get me before I’m gone.” Her nephew in Birmingham calls her a cross between Grandma Moses and Phyllis Diller. Her son Tim calls her a star. “I’m somewhat of a ham,” Alice admits. “I put on a show.” A show that has drawn visitors to her home in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, and has sent them home with her art for the past 11 years.
Neatly dressed for the stream of guests dropping by her living room to pick through prints, she keeps her white hair swept under a beret (she claims she doesn’t have time to comb it anymore). Her lightly rouged lips reveal an easy smile, and they’re always ready to drop the next one-liner. “I’m not a little old lady with a weekend hobby,” she says, all in good humor. “This is not just a hobby.” Full of detail and message, her portraits capturing life in the South make you think, laugh, even lament. Her work “The House Is Blue but the Old Lady Ain’t” sums up her life in her own shotgun house along the Gulf Coast, where she moved in 1988 from Plum Point, Mississippi. She’s won numerous awards for her art, even though she did not take up painting until age 60 while she cared for her terminally ill mother. Before that, she had only dabbled in china painting.
“If my Mom had not been ill, I never would’ve painted,” Alice says. “I think of it as her gift to me.” Alice on Retirement: “People think it’s some great secret that I’m working at age 89,” she says. “You have to have a reason to get up. I wake up and read the obituaries. If my name’s not in them, I get up and get dressed.” Alice on Life:“No one’s promised me immortality, but I’m beginning to wonder,” she quips. Alice on Aging: After her 89th birthday last December, she immediately started talking about the next one. “Ninety is just so much more impressive than 89,” she says. Alice still paints every day, that is if there isn’t a school group coming over; if she’s not attending a social function; or if she’s not entertaining a busload of tourists from New Jersey.
“When I stop painting you’ll know my work’s deteriorated,” she says. “I’ll know when to stop.” Nothing’s deteriorated. When she picks up a paintbrush she maintains the steadiness of a surgeon. Although she’s battled her blood pressure for the past year, she even manages to turn that into a chuckle: “If you’ve got any blood pressure at all at this age it’s gotta be a good sign.” Stacy Kunstel; Alice Moseley Studio: 214 Bookter St., Bay Saint Louis, MS 39520; (228) 467-9223. Hours: 12 a.m.-5 p.m. M-F, Sat.10 to 5,SUN 1-4 Prices: from $15.
