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
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
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!
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!
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
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…
I’ve always loved the movies. When I was twelve and had whooping cough that kept me out of school for the last six weeks of sixth grade, I remember watching Million Dollar Movie on Channel 9 in New York almost every weekday of those six weeks. That probably explains why I’ve seen so many of the movies run on Turner Classic Movies before. They weren’t and aren’t all in black & white, but I still enjoy those movies made in the 30’s, 40’s and early 50’s. The same movie would repeat all day and night, so you could tune in at any time and watch the beginning after the end! Strangely enough, in the old days when I was young, it was common practice to go into movie theaters regardless of showtimes.
Fast forward to a few months ago, when I was sitting in my studio doing some work on my iPad and looked up to see the TV on pause while my husband had left the room. I have no idea what film it was or who the actor on the screen was, (now, of course, I’m sorry I didn’t think to click on the guide to find out), I just knew it looked like a painting to me, so I picked up my phone and took a screen shot. Working on two paintings at once these last few months, it’s taken me a while to turn that screen shot into Blue Mood.
Seven years ago, fascinated with the challenge of being able to paint transparency in oil paint using glazes thinned with linseed oil, I started a series of paintings on 12” x 36” gesso boards with a match that had just been blown out. Painting the stream of smoke wafting up from that match led me to paint a birthday candle, a stick of incense, and a big fat cigar. For the fifth and final panel, I intended to paint a pipe. I googled images of pipes and came across several before I settled on a calabash, the kind of pipe that Sherlock Holmes smoked. Fast forward to last month, when I was going through the photos on my iPad and found the quirky blond smoking that pipe that I had painted for my fifth panel. I’ve been looking at that blond for years and finally thought I’d try to bring her to life. As much as I always enjoy painting portraits—she was a trip! She looks so very 1940’s to me, and with her chin out, pipe in mouth…that’s attitude for you…so Retro is what I’ll call her.
It was mid-September 2018, and my husband and I had just spent a few hours on a Sunday afternoon at Devereaux Beach in Marblehead MA, him sleeping in the sun and me reading in the shade. We were in our car getting ready to leave, when I looked up to see two women on a bench under the canopy in front of me. I was immediately struck by the notion that the woman on the left looked like my mother, who had died in 2002. Of course I knew it wasn’t Mollie…but in that haze through the windshield, she did have her profile. I took two photographs with my phone from inside the car: one of the two women and one of her alone, reading a paper. I didn’t get out of the car. I didn’t walk over to her. I didn’t want to know if she actually didn’t look like Mollie, because for that moment and, honestly, the rest of the day, I was somehow feeling comforted by the thought that i had been visited by a vision of my mother.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago…having finished a very large painting of a roseate spoonbill and wanting to paint some humans again, I had a small canvas that I thought would be perfect for painting that apparition of my mother. Of course I still had the photographs! Even more of a personal painting than those I’ve done of my grandchildren, now she’s on the wall of my bedroom, in full view of my bed…someone to watch over me.
My first oil painting was a still life of three pears. I followed it up with a painting of a bowl of cherries, then the makings of an egg cream—seltzer bottle and all. I continue to paint a still life now and then, but that series was the start, followed by sandwiches, china cups, and more. My first painting of tango dancers was a happy accident that I continued to paint on sixteen more canvases over the years, sometimes just painting the legs, others up to the dancers’ waists, and a few including more of their torsos. A visit to the New England Aquarium with my granddaughters inspired me to paint my first jellyfish, and I’ve done ten paintings of jellies in all. Nervous at the thought of attempting portraits when I was a novice, I painted a series of pop portraits first, taking inspiration from Andy Warhol and other artists from the 60’s, because I thought it would be easier than capturing all the more realistic details of a face. I segued to realistic portraits and figures soon after and, today, consider myself a portrait painter above all.
So it was no surprise that after I painted In the Pink, my first roseate spoonbill, I wouldn’t be done. I thought I’d do another 36” x 36” canvas, perhaps to hang as a diptych. Commerce intervened, and I found myself with a commission for a small painting of a spoonbill. Ready For My Closeup was the result, and once he was done, I was ready to paint that other large roseate. I’ve worked on him for the last month and couldn’t help thinking that he looked all dressed up and ready to dance in his glorious pink feathers, so I thought I’d call the painting Shall We Dance? I’m not saying I’ll never paint another bird…there are eagles and cranes and blue herons that abound here in Florida…but this spoonbill is it for me for now.
I have a good friend who has had a good friend for many years who is nuts for spoonbills. I don’t think she gets to see too many in the flesh, since she lives in California, and roseate spoonbills are the only spoonbill species found in the Americas, mostly in Florida and parts of Louisiana and Texas. After seeing In the Pink, my friend commissioned a small canvas portrait of a spoonbill for her friend, and Ready for My Closeup is what I came up with. Hope she likes it…
I’ve said before that it’s lovely when people tell you how much they love your work, but the highest compliment an artist can get is a commission or a sale. When I exhibited Hair Love at the BallenIsles Art Show 2021 in January, the curator saw fit to hang her in the Elvis spot for the exhibition: the painting everyone saw as they entered the building. My friends Sydelle Sonkin and Herb Siegel loved it and asked to buy it—and now Hair Love lives in their beautiful home! It’s a thrill for me to see it hanging amidst all the other wonderful art they own.
I painted Contact in black and white three years ago, a suggestive image of a couple on the verge of a kiss, on a canvas 36” wide but only 12” high. A year later I donated it to the Lighthouse Art Center for their annual fundraiser, D’Art for Art. Earlier this month, between paintings and with a spot on one of my walls that was calling to me, I took a canvas 24” wide and 12” high and thought I’d enjoy the challenge of painting that same carnal image in slightly different dimensions. As it turns out, I think this is the better proportion for what I’m now calling Seduction. Go know…
The BallenIsles Art Show 2021 is history…enjoyed in person and virtually for the last ten days by the people who live here. A bonus for me was getting to see some of my artists friends—people I’d painted with here until Covid sent us all home last March. One of these days, we’ll be painting together again.
When January comes along, it’s usually time for the BallenIsles Art Show. Despite the pandemic and luckily for 58 of the artists who live here, the art show opened today. It’s always a treat to see the work of so many talented people displayed, even if we have to be screened to enter the clubhouse, wear masks and be socially distanced. I can’t think of anything better to feed our souls right now than enjoying art…
Nancy Satin | Contemporary Oil Paintings 