I have been privileged with the opportunity to study closely with some of the finest painters teaching today, not only Steven Assael, but Nelson Shanks. We worked together in the studio, on the development of Studio Incamminati into the great school it has become, on several exhibitions and catalogs, and in his Art Students League class, where I worked as his teaching assistant for three years.

Sorting through memorabilia, I came across an interview published by American Artist magazine in 1970. Dick Goetz, who later served as best man in Nelson’s wedding to Leona, came to Nelson’s home Springdale in New Hope, Pennsylvania “to find out more about his background and painting methods.”

Nelson recounted a lesson from Pietro Annigoni, who pointed out “I simply had to decide what I felt, what I liked to do, and do that.”

Simple is not easy, we students at Studio Incamminati often sighed.

According to my mentor, Steven Assael:

“When you enjoy painting you are more of a hobbyist, but when you are serious you have to embrace all the terror, frustration, anxieties; it is horrible.”

I travel to study with Steven in his Manhattan studio some three to five times a year. Watching him paint evokes both inspiration and demoralization. I return to my Atlanta studio with a renewed sense of why I paint and a feeling of deep humility.

This is one of two studies I painted of the model Jasmine, here under a primary green light with a secondary light that was predominantly cool. How subtly the tones of the lights, shadows and half tones interacted became a wonderful exercise in studying the way nature arranges her palette.

Juror Joe Norman awarded my painting ‘Prognosis’ first prize in the Limelight Gallery at Binders in July 2015. My great niece, the talented singer and straight A student Rylee Sanders posed for me, along with professional models Annie Jefferson, Barefoot Bill Pacer, and his wife Ladonna Allison. The five of us spent many hours together, much of them listening to the Adrian Mole series of comic novels by the late Sue Townsend. The humor only enhanced Ladonna’s playful willingness to ham up her role as a doctor uncertain what the prognosis is for any of her patients or for the health care system as a whole.

En Route

to a First Prize at the Atlanta Artists Center in June, 2015. The show was titled ‘Reality or Abstraction?’ And this figure painting encompasses both ways of seeing. As every serious painter knows, you must be able to see abstractly in order to paint the figure well. I started this large painting of model Mona Reeves with a small group of artists in my studio, intending to spend several weeks. By the time I had made my composition, painted a head study, and made this first pass, my colleagues were finished with their paintings.  Little did I realize then, but mine had reached completion as well.