Lia Nickson

Lia Nickson died a few hours before the New Year in her loft in Manhattan. Her professional career as an artist included portraits for the University (historian Phillips Russell) and commissioned work around the country through Portraits South.
The daughter of UNC Romance Languages professor Howard Huse and Charlotte Vulliemoz, Mary Louise was born in Durham in 1924 and in 1925 the family moved to the house they built on Gimghoul Rd., which remained a family home till 2006.
As one of the first women to graduate UNC, Mary Louise had a first love in the theatre, writing and directing a musical, Gadabout, performed in Memorial Hall in 1943. She had also been active in her sorority, Pi Beta Phi, and achieved earlier notoriety for a gossip column written while in high school.
After leaving UNC, she studied art in New York, Los Angeles and Paris--particularly in the studios of Andre L’Hote, Serge Mako and Lubitch. During that time she married a UNC graduate student from New Mexico, Richard Nickson, with whom she collaborated on children’s books, illustrated poems and three sons, Guy, Joel and Gregory.
Her paintings outside the commissioned work received honors and one-woman shows at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, the Roswell Museum and Parrish Art Museum in Southampton. Dozens of her more whimsical paintings of chickens, flying eggs and floating cabbages continue to be seen by thousands each week in Chicago’s Wishbone Restaurants (www.wishbonechicago.com).
Once her children had left home, she returned to acting in roles performed for the George Bernard Shaw Society and in short films directed by her son, Gregory, (Drumstruck and 38).
Stricken by a degenerative aphasia lasting over fifteen years, Lia was freed from her living cocoon on the last blue moon of the decade. In a strange irony, the Gimghoul house where she grew up was razed earlier in the year.
She is survived by her husband, Richard, her brother Henry (and his family in Connecticut), her three sons and seven grandchildren.