![]() ![]() Painter also enumerates inspirations and omnipresent impressions. From Rembrandt to Faith Ringgold, from Matisse to Alice Neel. Old in Art School succeeds as a story of a budding artist, and also as guidebook: you can design your own art education by following along with Painter ’s readings and reflections on artists in the canon women artists who Painter appreciates, and elevates, and sometimes befriends artists who become important to Painter’s interests and to her cultivated eye. Writing deftly about the work of switching gears, and how to rev up to making art, Old in Art School decodes and details the substantive study and artistic processes Painter had to master in her sequence of studios, first at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, in Newark, and finally, at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). ![]() Art held off fatigue for what would have been hours as if hours had not really passed.” Painter is pointedly clear about her attraction to engagement with art: “Art stopped time. After a huge career, her decision to attend Art School reads in some ways like turning away from a well-traveled road and into the wilderness. ![]() Even though Painter’s prodigious accomplishments in History do not make People magazine, her status in American History has for decades been neon to academic faculty, feminists, historians, and cultural critics. Painter is the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University. An alert observer, Painter renders her experience with humor, with skepticism, with anxiety, and in many voices. Strong and spry and expectant, Painter finishes six years of Art School, completing two brand new degrees, by the striding age of seventy. Painter brings these strengths to her Art Education. Painter ’s keenly trained eye and intellect prompt her to recognize the specific and the theoretical. Together this colorful landscape and the very black people in white and spectacular clothing altered my vision of everyday life. Cadmium red bougainvillea climbing whitewashed buildings and cascading over fences and walls, some topped with menacing shards of broken brown glass or black wrought-iron spikes testifying to class tensions barricading the wealthy against the grasping poor. The dirt was Venetian red, the trees and grass Hooker ’s green. Looking back, Painter recalls how Ghana changed her, before her career in history, but in a patently artistic way: In Ghana I moved through a humid world of tropical contrasts and color-wheel hues. Painter possesses sketches she made in her early twenties, in the early 1960s, when her color-sight was awakened in Ghana, where she moved with her parents during the early days of the Black Liberation era. Art school awakens her long-held affinity for drawing. Nell Painter goes to Art School with gusto, and while there, she rediscovers an appreciation for her own hand. Of course, Nell Painter, with her portentous name, would use the freedom of retirement from History as a first career, and choose to launch a second career by going to Art School. When I was briefly a fleck of crystal in Nell Painter ’s orbit, when I taught Creative Writing at Princeton, where Nell Painter was permanently endowed, I could tell Nell was a painter by her palette-skin to hair to coat to shoes to portable accoutrements. Painter’s beloved husband has a different last name. ![]() Who can talk about the rock star historian Nell Irvin Painter without explicitly addressing the obvious, which is that her last name is Painter? This is her last name. Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over By Nell Painterīerkeley, CA Counterpoint, 2018, 352 pages with color illustrations, $26.00, hardcover ![]()
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