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annehallstudio

Monthly Archives: August 2015

In memoriam Nelson Shanks

30 Sunday Aug 2015

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When I wanted to study art seriously it was my extreme good fortune to learn about Nelson Shanks from Nancy Honea. She returned from a workshop to the portrait and figure class she taught in Atlanta and turned it upside down with the excitement and energy she experienced.

I did not have to wait long before I too could study with the dynamic master.

When Nelson‘s voice boomed out the crowd at the Armory Art Center jumped.

With spare words he commanded us to begin not merely to look, but to see.

To see the model as a whole.

To see the main direction of a pose.

To see a pose as lines and angles.

Our arms wearied as we worked to see and to show what we saw in a series of 30 second poses that lasted for hours.

Ever at our backs we heard his voice urging us to see, and to feel.

To feel the pose.

To feel it down to our toes, out through our fingers.

The hours became days and still he pushed us on.

Be powerful!

Be strong!

You have to be strong before you can be subtle!

Furiously we painted and wiped out and painted. At random moments he might appear to commend or to correct—no hesitation, no mincing of words, just direct and clear admonition.

As fast as we worked, there was little time to rejoice or regret whatever he said. I did begin to look out the corner of my eye to prepare for his intervention. The glimpse of any blue sleeve made me work harder and harder.

The experience was so intense that today, some fourteen years later, the lessons are still clear, and the work I do today still draws on these basic points.
To see the figure as a whole is not just a workshop challenge, it is the challenge the painter faces every moment of every day.

To see, though, is not enough; it is equally important to feel the pose, to feel the mood, in order to paint not just an anatomically correct figure, but a living feeling human being.

I left that first workshop convinced of these basic lessons and eager to learn more. I knew then that Nelson could teach me what I needed to become a professional painter. I had no way of knowing then how little that meant learning technique and how much it required of mastering my self and my learning process.

Nelson forged a career as a realist painter in an era when the world little cared nor long remembered what it means to be able to see and feel with perception and sensitivity.

While he takes pains to acknowledge every one of his teachers by name, it is clear that he became his own best teacher.

He gained his expertise, knowledge and skill through his own unrelenting hard work and honesty.

He discovered that teaching is the best learning tool ever invented through fifty years of teaching others what he himself had learned.

Studio Incamminati offered me the opportunity to immerse myself in the program he devised to replicate his best lessons.

I learned there that the growth of perception is a gradual process.

I see so much more than I could before, and yet I must continue to see the simple whole.

I learned not to let my feelings overtake my own process, to tolerate frustration, to welcome honest feedback.

I learned to rely on myself to set a task, to measure my progress, to decide what matters.

I learned from the example set before me that I must keep my eye on the big picture and let the details fall into their lesser place.

I taught high school students, college teachers, business professionals and other Incamminati students in a wealth of opportunities to hone my abilities to explain what I know.

In this I began to become my own teacher. My own student!

All in all, I learned as Nelson had before me, that the best way to learn how to paint is to paint.

More importantly, I came away with the conviction that the serious artist performs a service that is essential to the functioning of society.

The task of the artist is to understand nature as it burgeons from the inside out, not to copy from an outline in. It is my vital obligation to help others take a deeper look, and not just to look, but to see what really matters.

I hear Nelson describing his own process:

“Striving always to do better.

“We may not get there, but there is

“Meaning in the struggle.”

And I take these thoughts to heart.

The world is not only what we make of it. We make the world. Let it be filled with love and meaning.

Above: Larry and I traveled with Nelson to visit Luciano Pavarotti at his summer home in Pesaro. He was telling the photographer what he wanted for his album cover. He was however unable to dictate his preferences for the portrait of him that Nelson painted for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Long time friends, Nelson painted Luciano in the way he saw him, in a costume from Un Ballo en Maschera. Rather than photographs, he worked from previous studies from life, his powerful memory for visual images, and finely honed artistic sensitivity.

Starting over gets you further faster

25 Tuesday Aug 2015

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I am attending a portrait workshop taught by Steven Assael, and one of the attendees asked if we were going to finish our paintings. Steven respectfully replied it was up to the artist. It reminded me of something I have heard Nelson Shanks say many times. “Everyone wants to know how to finish a painting,” he would say, ” but the important thing is to learn how to start a painting.”

I spent many years studying with Nelson and the teachers he trained at Studio Incamminati. When I came to work with Steven, I started all over again to build the basics the way he put them together and to address the inevitable gaps in my training. Even though I earned a Certificate of Completion with honors from SI, I recognized there was more I needed to learn to be able to see and to paint the way I wanted.

I have hundreds upon hundreds of starts from my four years studying at SI full time. As workshops with Steven are far fewer and far between, I haven’t got nearly as many starts. But I do have a healthy collection of them. I took his instruction at the beginning and made very basic studies until I began mastering his principles. With every successive workshop, I have been able to go further and faster.

One of the best things a student can do is to figure out how to learn.

Tour my studio

22 Saturday Aug 2015

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Strength becomes her

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

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Extreme closeup of drawing study

Extreme closeup of drawing study

Models Mona Reeves and Annie Jefferson are collaborating with me on this painting. I cropped my study, which is 42 x 32″, so as to consider if I have made Mona’s expression as indominitable as must needs be. The working title of this painting is ‘Ring them Bells,’ in honor of the wonderful Bob Dylan anthem I first heard working in the studio of Victoria Herrera.

Summer Serendipity!

15 Saturday Aug 2015

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'Spectre'

‘Spectre’

'Stories Yet Untold'

‘Stories Yet Untold’

Sorry for all the hissing of sibyllant “s’s”….. Still happy to announce that juror Shane McDonald has selected ‘Spectre’ and ‘Stories Yet Untold’ for the Summer Serendipity Show at Johns Creek Art Center, Johns Creek, Georgia. If you are in town, the opening reception is Saturday, August 22, from 6-8 pm. The public is invited. (For those of you who aren’t in town, Johns Creek is one of the northern suburbs of Atlanta, and model Annie Jefferson strongly encouraged me to enter this show for exposure in another neck of the woods. Thanks, Annie!)

To have a good friend to push me to improve

11 Tuesday Aug 2015

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I feel so fortunate to have forged such a strong friendship and working relationship with Eddi Fleming in the time we spent together in Steven Assael’s studio. We review and compile our notes from his lectures, schedule time to practice what we have learned, and travel together to study with other great teachers to enhance our skills, such as Rob Liberace. Above you see examples of studies I made in Eddi’s studio last year after we returned from the Rochester Art Club workshop with Sue Lyon. We recognize that we each have different strengths and can provide each other with the best intentioned critiques.

A note on my visual inspirations

07 Friday Aug 2015

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"What Might Have Been"

“What Might Have Been”

Norman Rockwell liked the motif of a young girl in the mirror, measuring her looks by thone of magazine pictures. Though Annie looks like a girl from the back, her face in the mirror reveals she is a mature woman with adult concerns about where she is (does she need to leave?) and what she might have missed (what extinguished youthful passion?) Studying with Nelson Shanks attuned me to using objects as personae.

“What Might Have Been”

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

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The question inevitably arises: is this painting all it can be? In the midst of an overhaul of overhead lighting and a myriad of life complications for me and the model Annie Jefferson, the answer seems to be yes. Fitting that we also came to the conclusion of the Audible recording of Edith Wharton’s ‘House of Mirth,’ feeling anything but mirthful. Amid other studio clutter is the small study and larger charcoal drawing, for which Annie sat with leg bent back uncomplaining for hours and weeks–now at end.

Torn between two loves

02 Sunday Aug 2015

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I began to learn to draw before I learned to read, and ever since those two occupations dueled for first place in my heart. It makes this exhibition, “Celebrate the Future,” at the Atlanta Fulton Central Library particularly special for me. If you are in town, come to the opening reception during the first Thursday Art Walk, 5:30-7:00 pm, August 6. The address is One Margaret Mitchell Square, Atlanta, Georgia 30303.

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