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The 2024 BallenIsles Art Show

Today is your last chance to view the Ballenisles Art Show 2024 before it’s history. We’ve had a spectacular display for more than 2 weeks of the art produced by 87 talented painters, sculptors, photographers, potters and needlepoint artists in the Ballenisles Art Club. Opening with a gala for the artists on January 8th, I was lucky enough to have my most recent work, The Duchess and Tribute (to honor the life and work of Tony Bennett), displayed prominently in our beautiful lobby. While our community loves its games—golf, tennis, pickleball, bocce, etc.—it’s wonderful to see that feeding our souls with art is also high on our list!
http://www.nancysatinart.com/2024/01/25/the-2024-ballenisles-art-show

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OPEN ART EXHIBITION AT lightspacetime.art

This has been an unusual year for me, with so many commitments and pressures that I haven’t taken the time to enter the art competitions at the LightSpaceTime Online Gallery for months. So with just a few days remaining in this year’s Open Competition, with no restrictions as to subjects, I entered the last two paintings I finished this year. Instant gratification!! I received an email just two days later, congratulating me on being chosen for Special Recognition for the Painting & Other Media Exhibition through the next 3 months on their website: lightspacetime.art! The gallery received 683 entries from 23 different countries, as well as from 33 different states, so I’m proud to have The Duchess be a part of it. http://www.nancysatinart.com/2023//11/15/openartexhigitionatlightspacetime.art

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In Memorium

The world lost an icon last month when Tony Bennett died. I laugh as I write that I’m too young to have been a fan forever—but I have always loved his music and applauded the fact that he didn’t lose his voice to old age and could continue to perform successfully. I still haven’t deleted his fabulous last concert with Lady Gaga—when he had already been taken over by Alzheimer’s yet remembered every lyric once the music began! You can feel the love and admiration from Lady Gaga, who didn’t know if he’d know who she was when she walked out on that stage. But he certainly did!!

I had another, albeit small connection: my hairdresser, Vaughn Acord.

Though I lived near Boston, I started to get my hair cut in New York after my daughter got married and moved to New Jersey. Vaughn worked at Bumble & Bumble in 2005 but ultimately opened his own salon, called Mizu, on Park Avenue and continued to cut my hair regularly. He had quite a few private clients, celebrities mostly, including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Richard Gere and Tony Bennett, whose apartment wasn’t far and who had become his friend over the long relationship that developed over the years he had styled his hair and his shoots.  I’ve remained “friends” with Vaughn on FaceBook and Instagram through these years that I’ve lived in Florida, so I couldn’t miss his posts on August 21st, when Tony Bennett died, coincidentally, on Vaughn’s birthday. There were four touching photos of the two of them working and walking together and one full-figured portrait of Tony. A painter in search of a subject at that particular moment in time, I couldn’t help but be drawn to his famous profile. I hope I’ve done him justice…and his hair!

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She Must Be English

Life has intruded…and it’s been a while since I’ve posted, mostly due to a crazy year of major tasks needing to be completed before I could find the opportunity to finish The Duchess. My reference photo was a screenshot of a black and white photo of a woman in a hat taken sometime last year. I have several screenshots of women in hats and have even painted a few of them. From the day I did the drawing of this one in brown and sienna tones of paint and saw her looking back at me (despite those shaded eyes), I couldn’t help but think that this woman must be English. Mostly it was the hat. 

When I met him, my husband’s father was in the millinery business. It was just a few years later that American women stopped wearing hats. I’m not sure that women’s hats ever went out of style in England (certainly not for the royals!), but I do think that they’ve remained a part of British fashion forever. So all I could think of as I painted all the layers and turned her’s into a color portrait was that she must be English!

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The Boca Imaging Center Exhibit | SPOTLIGHT 22/23

I enter art competitions with some regularity to confirm my belief in myself as an artist when other eyes get to view my work. Last October there was a call for artists to enter a multi-media exhibit, Fall for Art, at the JCC in Boca Raton, so I joined Women In The Visual Arts (WITVA) in south Florida and displayed two paintings in the show. Before the year was up, there was another call for a special exhibit that was only open to five or six artists of all who applied. This exhibit has been running since 2013, thanks to curator Edie Minkoff, who is on the board of WITVA. I entered 8 paintings and hoped for the best.

DRUM ROLL PLEASE!!  

I am greatly honored to have been chosen as one of only six artists in WITVA to participate in SPOTLIGHT 22/23, a collection of One Woman Shows at the Boca Imaging Center at 7070 W Palmetto Park Road in Boca Raton. The art is available for viewing and sales Mondays-Fridays from 9AM to 5PM for the next year or so. The link to the YouTube video for SPOTLIGHT 22/23 is: https://youtu.be/aBlovXGNxkw. It is my privilege to have these six paintings displayed there… 

Rising, On Fire, Blue Mood, Bandstand, Closeup and Diva

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The 2023 BallenIsles Art Show

The annual BallenIsles Art Show opened last night, featuring wonderful art in different mediums by the many talented residents who live and create here.

It was particularly special because after the last two years of wearing masks and few celebrations, we enjoyed a fabulous Gala, complete with cocktail party and spectacular dinner.

The show can be viewed through January 27th.

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The Greatest Gift

Our littlest grandchildren, when asked what they wanted for Chanukah this year, each requested a small painting for their new bedrooms. Lasa, who is 8, asked for a unicorn blowing rainbow bubbles. I cheated a little & made this unicorn’s bubbles the colors of a rainbow.

Mila, who is 6, asked for a cheeseburger with French fries and popcorn, her favorite foods. I stuck a toothpick with a gold star in her cheeseburger to celebrate her gold medal win for her vault in a gymnastics competition a few weeks ago.

Teddy, who is 4 and our 6th and last grandchild and only grandson, asked for a shark with a lightning bolt! At first, I painted a more realistic lightning bolt but decided Teddy would appreciate a more cartoony version.

Unfortunately unable to be with our son’s family this holiday season (though we did have a great time with our daughter’s family), I had to ship their Chanukah gifts to them this year. The greatest gift for me was watching their reactions as they each unwrapped their paintings. Priceless!!

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4th Annual Primary Colors Exhibit | November 2022

Anticipation

The LightSpaceTime Online Gallery held its Primary Colors juried competition from August through October, receiving 596 entries from 23 different countries and 31 states plus the District of Columbia. It was a call for art that used at least one of the primary colors (red, blue &/or yellow) as a key element, so I entered Anticipation in the Painting and Other Media category. How nice to have received an award for Special Recognition today–the exhibit will be featured on the website homepage: http://www.lightspacetime.art for the next three months. #feelinggrateful

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Dance Party

I’ve always been attracted to dancers. Maybe because I took so many dance classes as a kid…and actually got to dance on a local New York TV show like American Bandstand when I was a sophomore in high school. I took jazz classes as an adult, not to mention disco classes with my husband in the 70’s & early 80’s. We still often have a chance to dance on any Friday night at the club where we live. So that’s one reason I chose to paint Bandstand. There are a few others. I loved the idea of painting silhouettes where movement is the point, not features. And their shadows! I’ve been looking at images with shadows for a long time, thinking about painting a series…maybe this painting will be the start.

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4th Annual Summer 555 Art Competition

The LightSpaceTime Online Gallery holds a special summer art competition that features an entry fee of $5 for artists to enter 5 images of their artwork and the gallery selects 5 overall winning artists. Loving the rare bargain, I submitted my entries, and though I wasn’t one of the overall winning artists in the Painting & Other Media Category, I did receive Special Recognition for 2 of the 5 images I submitted: A Garden of Love and La Cubana. The exhibition can be viewed from July 5th through September 5th on www.lightspacetime.art. It’s so lovely to get good news, especially when most of the news isn’t.

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Shall We Fly?

Shall We Fly?

I had finished my last painting of a roseate spoonbill over a year ago when I saw a photograph of a ballerina online and knew I had to paint her…so I took a  screenshot. I had called the spoonbill painting Shall We Dance? because that bird reminded me of a ballerina about to dance. Now I had a photograph of a ballerina in a fantastic costume that reminded me of the spoonbill enough to think she might be asking him to fly, if only she had the chance! Some paintings come easy. This one didn’t. I started with the grisaille at the end of July last year,  did some traveling in August and then worked on her on and off, in between other paintings, for a couple of months. As my friend Alan Winter (winterboyart.com) has sometime said, “the muse is not always with me,” The ballerina lived on the floor in the corner of my studio until last month. when I decided to stop trying to make her look like a bird and just let her be the beautiful, graceful reminder (for me) of that bird.  

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Artistic License

   

A Garden of Love

I had my everyday life interrupted in a good way from mid-March until this week. I taught a beginner’s drawing workshop, called So You Think You Can’t Draw, in four 2-hour sessions for the Art Club at BallenIsles, participated in a panel discussion for the Art Club that included a 15-minute talk (with samples and slide show) about my “artistic journey” and co-chaired a luncheon for a dear friend of mine who was being honored. All of that meant that I didn’t have much time to paint, so A Garden of Love took forever to finish.

Inspiration strikes in many different ways, and I am often inspired by photographs I see online. I don’t mean that I go trolling for photographs of things I might want to paint; I mean that when I see a photograph that interests me while I’m reading an article or checking notifications on a website, I take a screenshot and save it. In October of last year, I saw a photo of a stained glass torso with an infant in utero that I thought was brilliant.  

While I start almost every painting with a monochromatic drawing, my approach to painting this torso was a little different. I began with a simple drawing of her shape, but once I started to draw the flowers covering her breasts, I just set myself free and let my brush travel all over her body to include the leaves and blossoms and color wherever I thought they made sense. My proportions were also slightly different from the original image (she’s taller now…more like me), so I had to correct my version to include more of her body. A bit of a departure from my original inspiration, this was just great fun to paint. I can still see the stained glass in it, but I’m not sure anyone else would.

Artistic license…      

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11th Annual All Women Art Exhibition | February 2022

Blue Mood

The LightSpaceTime Gallery’s competition for January was open to 2D & 3D women artists only and appropriately had an open theme. The gallery received 1,147 entries from women artists in 30 different countries around the world, as well as from 41 different states and the District of Columbia. With such a huge field, I am particularly proud that Blue Mood received Special Recognition in the Painting and Other Media category. The exhibit can be viewed this month, February 2022, on lightspacetime.art. Enjoy the all women show!

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The 2022 BallenIsles Art Show

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

The 2022 BallenIsles Art Show closed tonight and celebrated the artists with a closing reception and cocktail party. It opened on January 10th and was extended through today and features the many talented artists who live and create here in BallenIsles. Another art show wearing masks in the clubhouse and having opening celebratory events cancelled because of the pandemic, at least we were able to enjoy seeing the art for an extended period of time…

Shall We Dance?