Nina Weiss, a fine arts painter/teacher from Evanston, creates large-scale landscapes on unstretched canvas and smaller Waterways paintings.
Weiss’ “Red Flower Prairie.” (Photo provided)
Weiss lives, works and teaches in an 1,800-square-foot home/studio loft in Evanston’s West End Arts district. The industrial/residential area connects her to Evanston and especially to the art community, and many of her neighbors are artists. The home has 40-foot ceilings, sky lights and bedrooms in the loft.
A custom-constructed work wall allows her to attach stretched canvas directly to the wall and there are large storage racks. Cement floors make the space easy to clean, and she stands on cardboard or a mat when painting. The furniture is on wheels so she can easily reconfigure the space depending on her activity. She has a mobile hanging rack on a guy wire strung across the room for presenting both her and her student’s work. The entire studio is set up to eliminate obstacles to painting.
During COVID-19, Weiss configured a space for Zoom classes, including an ongoing weekly Critique Class. She is excited to return with her students to France this summer for her European Landscape Painting and Drawing Workshop.
Weiss set up a work space that lets her attach stretched canvases to the wall. (Photo provided)
At the start of a new painting, Weiss gathers all the needed materials atop a white table where she can easily access them. The table also gives her a surface to photograph, pack and/or ship the paintings. She uses a glass palette salvaged from a dumpster-found coffee table. The glass makes it is easy to scrape and clean off old paint. She deploys a step ladder to reach the upper portions of her largest canvases
Even though she might work any time, she tends to exercise in the morning and work after. A typical work afternoon/evening is split in 2-5-2 hours of painting between breaks.
Every Weiss painting interprets a natural landscape she has seen. Nature’s creativity makes her feel happy, whole, excited and connected to the earth. Unsurprisingly, each painting starts when she is inspired while outdoors on a walk or a bike ride while watching for potential compositions or, as she notes, “things that give me a jolt.” Recently, she has been inspired and focused on prairie scenes. She takes many photos of a promising landscape and prints just a selected few to crop and develop, revealing a composition for the painting.
Weiss’ studio. (Photo provided)
She preps by cutting a canvas to the scale needed, stretching and gessoing the surface, and then uses a snap line – like in construction – to create the exact size rectangle of the soon-to-be finished work. In this way, the final image will fit on a stretcher frame that might be added after the painting is complete. She then attaches the canvas to the work wall and is ready to paint.
Weiss starts by adding a thin, color ground over the entire canvas, and then draws with paint to create the basic composition. Next, she uses a strong saturated color for the initial underpainting. Then she adds multiple paint layers including glazes, broken brush strokes and lightening strokes until complete.
Weiss says, “I know when it’s good.” She has worked on her current creation for about a week, and it is taking shape.
Her completed works are on unstretched canvases. Each may be sold that way, stretched only, or framed by a gallery.
If Weiss needs a break after creating five or six large landscapes, she will work on her smaller, 12 inch x 12 inch ongoing Waterways painting series. These provide a break for the artist as they are painted using a different method.
While she works on one painting at a time until it is complete, Weiss often builds up an inventory before photographing and marketing. Happily, she has sold so many works recently that not many remain in the studio.
Most of Nina Weiss’ work is sold through J. Petter Galleries in Saugatuck, Mich., but she also sells through other galleries and online websites. She posts on Saatchi as Nina Weiss, on her website and through her teaching website.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
