Vickery was a painter for whom marine painting was not a specialization but a sustained, lifelong subject, a body of work returning over and over to the same questions of light, weather, and motion at sea, and registering small differences with the patience of a lifelong observer.
Vickery's path into painting was shaped by an unusual childhood proximity to large bodies of water. Born in Illinois and raised partly in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, he grew up around lakes and shorelines at a moment when American outdoor culture and small-craft sailing were entering a particular high point. His formal art education in Chicago gave him the technical foundation, but the decisive influence on his subject and method came from his sustained personal study of Lake Michigan in all its weathers and from his deep reading of Winslow Homer, whose marine paintings he held up as the standard against which his own work would be measured.
He opened his first studio at twenty-four with very little institutional support. The early work was experimental, the prices low, paintings reportedly traded for as little as five dollars or, on one occasion, a dish of ice cream, and the lean years gave him an observational discipline and a working knowledge of materials that would later distinguish his marine paintings from those of more conservatory-trained contemporaries.
The breakthrough recognition arrived in the early 1950s, when his work began to draw critical attention in Chicago, and from that point onward he was able to paint full time. His work developed in the direction that defined the rest of his career, large-scale, naturalistic depictions of historic sailing ships in open ocean conditions, set against atmospheric studies of weather and water.
The mature paintings are characterized by their close attention to the optical behavior of water, the reflections, transparencies, and color shifts referenced in the line above, and by a strong, almost theatrical handling of light. He returned again and again to the conditions that interested him most: storm light, dawn, sunset, the calm before weather, the moment a ship crests the wave. The combination earned him a steady following both among marine art collectors and within the official institutions of American marine painting, where he gathered prizes consistently over a span of decades.
He continued to paint and exhibit through his eighties, dying in La Grange, Illinois, at the age of eighty-five. His position today is that of one of the most accomplished American marine painters of the postwar period, an artist who carried the tradition of nineteenth-century American sea painting forward into the late twentieth century with unusual conviction and unusual depth of observation.