Author: WSA

November Artist Spotlight

Meet Katherine Fast

Many thanks to the welcoming and supportive WSA community for this opportunity to share my story. I began dabbling in watercolor after retiring from a long (some would say eclectic) corporate career of forty-five years.

I fell in love with the vivid colors, translucence, and play of light possible using the medium. My paintings are realistic (well, recognizable). Subjects are often pets, people, situations that tell a story or evoke emotion, or treasures from the past that make me smile.

Throughout the last fourteen years I’ve taken lessons from some of the best and most patient instructors through Weston Council on Aging programs and other outside workshops: Paul Alie, Paul George, Marla Greenfield, Andrew Kusmin, Sally Meding, Mary Jo Rines, Dawn Scaltreto, Tony Visco and Nancy Walton. In addition to WSA, I’ve been honored to show with the Needham Arts Association, New England Watercolor Society, the Scituate Art Association and the Rhode Island Watercolor Society.

There is no discernable pattern in my story. With a BA in history from Oberlin and a year as an admissions counselor under my belt, I ventured from Ohio to Boston where there was absolutely no need for history majors.

Through a typing gig, I wangled a job managing Ford and Carnegie Foundation grants at the Sloan School of Management and then joined several MIT faculty member’s spin off consulting companies, first in management information systems and then in quantitative market research, evaluating consumer products prior to market launch— stuff like shampoos, crackers, nicotine gum, frozen tacos, dried baby food, ant and roach killers—challenging work and a great source of frequent flyer miles.

I had no business working alongside quantitative genii except that I could translate technical terms into plain English for brand managers…calling a centroid a dot, a vector a line, not to mention the contortions of explaining multinomial logit models. While cavorting in the land of regressions, I also played violin with the MIT symphony for nine years and studied graphology, handwriting analysis.

My next adventure involved using handwriting analysis for hiring decisions, counseling, jury selection, threat letters and forgeries. Finally, as a head hunter I recommended myself for my last honest job, teaching seminars to large corporations and government agencies here and abroad on how  to organize and present complex business documents.

Free at last, I began scribbling and dabbling. After publishing a few short stories. I joined three other writers and became a contributing editor and compositor of six anthologies: Best New England Crime Stories. I parlayed one short story into a mystery, and just sent my third novel off to the publisher. (Check ‘em out: Katfast.com)

Somewhere along the line I settled in Weston and married my college sweetheart twenty years after graduation. He retired last year after fifty-one years of teaching English, the last thirty-five at the Belmont Hill School. It’s been a fun and rewarding ride. Now I can cherish free time to paint and play with words, and relax with my husband, mouthy German Shepherd and three tuxedo cats.

October Artist Spotlight

Meet Hannah Nersasian

Hannah Nersasian creates playful acrylic paintings of animals, birds and bugs, using vintage papers or reclaimed boards as her canvases. Originally from Somerset, England, Hannah moved to the USA in 2010. She now lives in Framingham MA with her husband, 9yo son and 5yo daughter. 

Tell us a little about your background as an artist…

Art and painting have been a refuge for me since childhood. In highschool I’d camp out in the art room as a survival tactic. I studied Art up until A-level but decided English Literature was a safer degree choice – a decision I now seriously question!

I ended up working in the non profit sector but would always find a way to steer my work back towards creating – be it decorating a dolls’ house for a family shelter playroom or organizing mural painting for corporate volunteers. When my son Wylder was born I stopped work and threw myself head first into motherhood. I found it all consuming and overwhelming and soon started painting regularly during his nap time as a way to reclaim my sense of self. 

What do you paint?

I almost always paint animals, birds or bugs – they just spark my interest more – and I use fun backgrounds as a way to say something about the subject. When I first started selling my work I tried to paint what I thought would sell rather than what I found most appealing. Unsurprisingly, I’m not the biggest fan of this earlier work! It wasn’t until I started painting things that delighted and amused me that I really found a style that felt true to me. I often paint pieces designed to interact with each other – a fox staring at a squirrel, an owl hovering above a tiny mouse. 

What is your process? 

I love to find interesting backgrounds and reclaimed things (record sleeves, chopping boards, sheet music or maps) and to use that as a jumping off point for the subject. A map of North America sparks the migration of Monarch Butterflies or the musical direction “Lento” might inspire a snail painting. 

Once I have the background and an idea for a subject, I’ll search for a reference photo. Where possible I take my own photographs, but often use Pixabay, Unsplash or buy stock photos. Then I decide on the placement of the image and when it’s sketched out I’ll start laying down paint. A painting will take many different layers of color and texture before it has the depth I’m happy with. And for a bird or animal with feathers / fur, it can take ages to build up those layers. I tend to paint as much detail as a can and I use tiny brushes. 

Why do you paint?

I’m an introvert living in a house of noisy extroverts and I have a very busy mind that can teeter into anxiety at times. Painting is the closest I get to meditation. When I’m immersed in painting, I concentrate fully and time zooms past at an unbelievable rate (not that that’s necessarily a good thing!). I also see it as a way of putting my whole quirky self out there for the world to know – and I like to highlight nature and all the tiny incredible things around us that are so often overlooked. 

What are your painting goals for the next year? 

My daughter started Kindergarten this September and I’ve found myself with more time and quiet than I’ve ever had. I’m hoping that this year I’ll form relationships with more shops and galleries, join additional local Artist groups, answer Calls for Art and really try to sell my work consistently. First up is the fall show “FRESH” at Gallery Twist in Lexington, where I have a number of pieces. I’m also trying to grow my instagram account in a meaningful way – forming connections with other artists and nature/art lovers rather than just follower numbers. My Instagram handle is @wyld_woodland

September Artist of the Month

Meet Nelson Hammer

Growing up on Long Island in the 1950s, one of the few elementary school-related assignments I remember was given to us at end of each school year: We had to draw a picture of a child running after a truck. The results were kept by the schools (no copiers then!) to measure the artistic progress of each student over the years. My teachers and friends always thought highly of my efforts, and it was one of my favorite assignments to do. I’ve enjoyed drawing for as long as I can remember, and still own many sketches I did as a teenager.

My parents bought me an oil-painting set when I was in college, and I took to it with relish. I also supplemented my parents’ allowance at school by doing charcoal portraits of my friends, with my best friend standing behind me to give me real-time critiques of my progress because I had a tendency to err on shapes and forms. I charged $2 a pop. Not much of a supplement.

I graduated with a BS in landscape architecture in 1969. Upon graduation, getting job, earning a living, getting married and having a family became roadblocks to my work in oils, especially because I painted so slowly. Despite my interest, I never took art classes during or after college. After my two children left home for school, I created a few more oils, but was becoming less interested in it due to the odors of turpentine and linseed oil…and the lack of ventilation.

During the summer of 2014, as I was strolling through a Michael’s crafts store with my wife and two eldest granddaughters, I spotted a starter watercolor kit and bought it on a whim. Now, what to paint? I digitally strolled through the web, keyed in beautiful, colored birds, and off I went. I had painted several  birds when a friend advised me that I could liable for copyright infringement by creating derivative images of published material. I thought my bird painting was over!

Enter two relatives who were excellent amateur photographers: my daughter’s mother-in-law, Brenda Robert, and a first cousin, Mike Funk. They were eager to offer me an endless supply of subject matter, and a year or so after that, I received permission from several professional bird photographers to use their photos without fee. Crisis averted….until I filled out applications to join the Wellesley Society of Artists (WSA), and later, the New England Watercolor Society (NEWS). Both forbid the use of photos by others as source material. Gotta use my own photos!

Since bird photography is an art form of its own of which I had neither the skill nor the desire to learn, I turned to landscapes several years ago, which my landscape architectural background had helped foster. When my wife passed away in 2021 after living in Needham for 42 years, I moved in 2022 to an apartment in Wellesley Hills  located across Route 9 from the Hemlock Gorge Reservation, home of Echo Bridge. If it is possible to fall in love with an inanimate object, I did just that, and have painted the bridge four times and counting.

However, the allure of painting birds and other fauna remained, yet I was resolute in wanting no part of investing in telephoto lenses and learning the nuances of DSLR and/or smartphone cameras. What to do? I know! Go to where birds and other fauna- having no fear of humans- casually interact with us without the need for a long lens! Off I went last December to the Galapagos Islands, had the time of my life, and took dozens of photographs of birds, sea lions, lizards, and giant turtles that have already been- and will in the future become additional- source material for my watercolors.

I was quick to realize that joining local associations would be very helpful me in both displaying my art and networking with other artists; I joined the Needham Art Association the same year I started painting. Since I was still as yet unable to wean myself from using others as photographic sources, I did not join NEWS until 2018 and was made a Signature Member in 2022. I also finally joined WSA soon after I moved to Wellesley Hills.

My painting style- realism with a focus on detail- dictates that I paint deliberately. I make no effort to hasten the completion of my pieces for a few reasons:

• Painting is my life! It’s the journey, not the destination for me; my least favorite task is signing my name to a finished piece.
• I am fortunate that I can support myself in retirement without the need sell my art. It remains a hobby. If I am able to sell a piece, all the better. I’m averaging about 1.3 sales a year. No financial reason to rush a piece.
• I now live in a two-bedroom unit in which the second bedroom is my studio. The bedroom and living room walls are filled with my work not to display my ego but because of a lack of space to store pieces. Other framed and unframed art are stacked, not hung, in my studio, in closets, and in one unusual case, in my guest bathtub. Painting slowly extends the length the time available before I run out of space.

Lastly but most importantly, art has been by my side and in my head when I needed it most during the past few years. Since I started painting in watercolors in 2014, orthopedic issues have taken tennis, then golf from me. But I can still paint! In the last three years, I lost my wife of 49 years, sold my house, moved to an apartment in another town, and retired the day I moved. A lotta stuff to absorb, and I couldn’t have gotten through it as readily as I did without my art… a blessing NOT in disguise!