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December Issue 2007
Edward Dare Gallery in Charleston, SC, Features Works by Rich Nelson
Edward
Dare Gallery in Charleston, SC, will present the exhibit, People,
Places and Things, featuring recent landscape, figurative
and still life paintings by Rich Nelson. The exhibit opens on
Dec. 7 and continues through Dec. 31, 2007.
Nelson is an award-winning portrait and gallery artist residing
in the mountains of NC. Though portraiture is a major part
of his career, he also loves painting landscape, still life, and
figurative gallery pieces. He is endlessly fascinated by
people, places, and things, and considers it a privilege and a
challenge to capture some aspect of their essence on canvas.
All of Nelson's gallery work is done exclusively from life. "I work toward 'painterly realism'; good drawing and composition, rendered with strong natural color, in such a way that you can still 'sense' or 'feel' the paint. The effect of this process is that the subject begins to artfully reveal itself to me and hopefully, the viewer".
Hailing from Detroit, MI, Nelson earned his BFA from the prestigious College Of Creative Studies in 1988. It was at CCS that he developed his love of painting, drawing, figurative art, and art history. He has been working as an artist ever since, initially as an illustrator, then as a portrait artist, gallery artist, and instructor.
Nelson remembers Russell Keeter as a great artist and teacher at Detroit's Center (now College) For Creative Studies. Keeter was born in Cramerton, NC, in 1935, studied at Ringling and the Pennsylvania Academy, and moved to Detroit, where he died in 1991. He was dedicated to the study of anatomy, and taught painting and drawing as well. "I would give anything to spend some time with him again. I took his anatomy class twice, and became friends with his family. Later I took his protege Eugene Clark's class, then I taught anatomy for a few semesters at CCS. What I took away was the conviction that if you could paint the figure, you could paint anything, but you wouldn't want to paint anything else."
Nelson took that statement to heart for the first 15 years of his career, studying the figure and then portraiture. In 2003, at the urging of a student (artist Richard Seaman, now a good friend) he began painting landscapes outdoors as well as still life compositions in the studio. He has now become obsessed with these new directions in his career. Portraiture is still an important part of his painting life, but the addition of landscape and still life to his primary body of work has been an exciting endeavor. Upon joining the Edward Dare Gallery in Charleston, gallery owner and director Julie Sweat commented, "that once she saw the portraiture by Rich, she knew that his landscapes would be phenomenal." Rich's reply to that was that, "these trees were kicking him in the pants' and that the skills and vision needed to paint a tree successfully should not be taken lightly!"
Although Nelson painted seriously in college, he still was not sure that he would make it as an artist, even after art school. "It's hard to imagine that you can make a living doing something you love. Once you get that positive reinforcement that people are interested in your work, it gets in your blood. Not just from the payment, but from the realization that your work spoke to someone and they valued it enough to own it. It becomes a constant thought; look at that sky, look at that face, it would be great to put this onion with this garlic and create a still life study. It is nice to be that obsessed. It is a critical connection when your work sparks something in the viewer, and it is really an honor when someone buys your work. I tell students that the goal is to make work that triggers the impulse in the viewer that they want to steal this piece, that they have to have it."
Music has also been an important part of Nelson's life. He grew up with four brothers, and they all played guitar and piano. He learned to play by ear, much to the dismay of his mother who wanted him to learn to read music. "I learned theory and began writing songs, while I saw really talented classically trained students who just sight read and never wrote anything." From about the age of 12 through college and beyond Nelson played guitar in bands that wrote and recorded their own songs. He still plays guitar and piano and in talking with the artist one hears many analogies between painting and music that he uses to describe his creative process and philosophy.
When asked if he has a favorite subject or style of painting, Nelson responds, "Who can say what will grab you? It's like the way a song hits you. It's often an intangible thing, not brush strokes, not values. I tell students that creating a good painting is like juggling plates; there are plates for composition, drawing, value, color, brushwork, and then there's the mystery plate. Everything can be technically perfect with all of the plates spinning perfectly, but if the mystery plate, the poetry, is not there, the painting can be flat."
As far as the technical side of painting is concerned, Nelson notes that he is very much a creature of habit, strictly adhering to the routine of stretching his own linen canvases and priming them with rabbit-skin glue and lead white pigment. He also learned from Everett Raymond Kinstler that "your palette is like your keyboard. Everything has to be in the same order on your palette every time you paint so you don't have to think about it. If not, it would be like playing the piano with the notes switching places."
"When you paint you have to be inspired
by something or else you are just sight-reading. It's like the
difference between simply playing a piece with technical skill
and writing your own songs and playing them with emotion. You
have to be careful to find things that fire that creative or the
poetic side of the painting. You have to know why are you
painting it. There has to be a story in it or something that relates
to one's experience. Take portraits for example, I know how
much I love my family. Can I get that feeling into a painting
of someone I'm just meeting?"
"One can get bogged down in the technical aspects of creating
a painting," adds Nelson. "That's one thing I've been
working on lately; to try and be more inspired and poetic and
not worry about the details so much; to be more intuitive. This
pursuit is very close to the heart and purpose of painting on
site outdoors with ever changing light and conditions. It is sometimes
a struggle to leave things on the canvas as you have painted them
initially. You think to yourself 'I could make that cloud more
perfect'. Artist and friend Bart Lindstrom describes needing
to build a 'mental fence' around passages of the painting to leave
alone. You always think you can make them better but they lose
the energy of the initial strokes."
"Certain songs can serve as markers in your life, and painting is the same. You remember certain times in your life by the pieces you were working on at the time. One of the main differences however is the solitary nature of being a painter versus the comraderie typically inherent in being a musician in a band. It's kind of a weird compulsion for someone that enjoys family and friends as much as I do to be obsessed to pursue these solitary endeavors. On a recent trip to the coast, I was compelled to go off to a nature preserve alone to get bitten by bugs and paint while my family enjoyed the beach. I was completely driven to do this and felt very satisfied at the end of the day."
Whether working in the studio or outdoors, Nelson strives to do museum quality work that will be around long after he and his subjects have left this world.
For further information check our SC Commercial
Gallery listings, call the gallery at 843/853-5002 or visit (www.edwarddare.com).
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