Our landscape season would not be complete without a mention and small retrospective of the work of American painter, Nelson White.
Daniel Graves, “Nelson White portrait”, 2013
Nelson H. White, “Bagno La Salute Viareggio #2”, Oil on panel, 12 x 20 in. 2008
Nelson is legendary amongst FAA students and alumni for his decades-long support of the academy, and a continuous presence as a student each academic year. We, at The Florence Academy of Art, appreciate and admire Nelson for many reasons: his generosity towards students, his total commitment to preserving and furthering the FAA’s mission and that of figurative realism in general, and finally, his dedication to his own art that has absorbed his life and left the world a record of colorful Italian beaches, glowy snow covered landscapes, and Nelson’s beloved marshes of the Hamptons.
Nelson took his first lessons from his grandfather and father, absorbing the love of nature of american impressionism. He recalls his father would often say ‘painting is like juggling, don’t work in one area, work all over the picture, this is to have more information of values (light, middle tones and dark) to make it easier to compare one to the other’. When painting the sky, he would say ‘remember that the sky domes, it isn’a curtain’.
To this day, Nelson catches himself thinking of this advice when he finds himself painting the sky too flat. He also remembers his father quoting Abbot Thayer mentioning how his teacher back in Paris, Jean-Léon Gérome, would chide him when his work lacked ‘system’, meaning painting the shadow shapes and values.
Nelson H. White, Mashomack Pt, Oil on panel, 20 x 48 in. 2013
In 1955, Nelson decided to devote himself to a career as an artist and traveled to Florence, Italy to become a pupil of Pietro Annigoni, the painter renowned for his portraits of JFK and Queen Elizabeth. Annigoni and Nelson became fast friends. They would sometimes sit side by side when they went landscape painting. Annigoni was always generous about showing his pupils how he worked and having them come close to see. Nelson learned immensely from Annigoni’s way of painting landscapes with ink washes, just concentrating on rendering visually in terms of values. He would say, ‘getting the values right is the most important thing, that’s what gives life to the drawing, more than color. When you have color there can be the risk of concentrating too much on that and not getting the values completely right. In a well constructed ink wash drawing, you can forget that it lacks color, because the values say it all.’ Even today, Nelson is constantly checking his scene with the black mirror his grandfather gave him, a simple device that eliminates color so that he can focus on the darks and lights.
Nelson H. White, “Yellow Umbrellas”, Oil on panel, 12 x 16 in. 2011
Nelson also studied in the Florentine atelier of the great Italian teacher, Nerina Simi (Nerina’s father was an Italian Macchiaiolo painter who had studied with Jean Léon Gérome). It was at Simi’s studio that Nelson met FAA Founder, Daniel Graves, as well as, Director of the FAA Intensive Drawing Program, Simona Dolci. All three were young artists in pursuit of the method that would lead them to produce figurative work in the tradition of the masters.
On weekdays in Florence, Nelson is a student at The Florence Academy of Art, where he focuses on portraiture and figure painting alongside his fellow FAA students. But on Friday afternoons, Nelson heads to Viareggio or Torre del Lago on the Tuscan coast to pursue his true passion, alla prima landscape painting.
Nelson H. White, “Viareggio, Italy”, Oil on panel, 16 x 20 in. 2007
Color has become one of Nelson’s trademarks, along with the bright umbrellas that dot the sandy Italian beaches. His brushwork is bold, his impastos can be thick, and his color palette always vibrant and in tune with the sunny scenes. In each painting, Nelson captures the spirit of the moment when he is surrounded by nature. He says, “At first I was still finding my subject, developing a feel for the objects before me. Now I am more intent on the atmosphere, to render a feel for the moisture, the humidity in the air. I want to produce a complete scene, where everything is connected.”
Nelson H. White, “Bagno La Salute”, Oil on panel, 9 x 13 in. 2013
As Peter Trippi, editor of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine, expressed in the attached essay that accompanied the catalogue to Nelson White’s 2012 exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art, Nelson has “impacted the artworks and lives of hundreds of Florence Academy students.”
For this, the FAA Collective pays homage to Nelson, and is delighted to show several recent paintings courtesy of Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where they are currently on view.
To learn more about Nelson and his work please visit:
