By Annette Hinkle of The Sag Harbor Express

As an artist, Nelson H. White leads an enviable life. Eight months of the year he lives in Florence, Italy, where he studies at the Florence Academy of Art. Each summer, he returns to Shelter Island and his family home built nearly 100 years ago by his grandfather, Henry C. White where he paints the local seascapes.

The paintings of Nelson H. White (both those created in Italy and here on the East End) will be featured in “Shifting Sands” a one man show opening this Saturday, June 25 at the Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

You could say that art is in White’s blood — Henry White was a professional artist, as was White’s own father, Nelson C. White. In fact, it was art that first brought Henry White, a Connecticut native, to the East End. He was introduced to the area by Edward Bell, a member of the early 20th century artists colony in Peconic on the North Fork — another colony, on the South Fork, was led by William Merritt Chase.

“In 1908, my grandfather sailed to Peconic from Connecticut and picked up my father, who was 8, and they sailed to Coecles Harbor in Shelter Island,” says White. “When they landed, they saw weakfish going ashore and wanted to know where they caught them. A guy took them to West Neck Creek and my grandfather bought 10 acres.”

“My grandfather was a good painter and a wonderful amateur architect,” explains White. “He had a feeling for location. He constructed a fishing camp and then a house for the family.”
It would seem that in addition to his artistic talent, White has also inherited his grandfather’s sense of place. For decades, Florence has been White’s second home — for 30 years he was an apprentice to the renown Italian painter Pietro Annigoni and also painted under the tutelage of Nerina Simi.

During his years in Florence, White had come to know Daniel Grave, director of the Florence Academy of Art, which teaches students to work in the Old Masters’ style of realism. And while he was impressed by the work being produced at the school, White was committed to Annigoni and Simi. But when both artists died, White began to rethink things.

“They both died within a year of each other — 1987 and 1988,” says White. “I was very much off on my own.”

White was intrigued by the slightly different painting methods that Graves employed at the school and decided to learn more. He is now on the board of the Florence Academy of Art and studies there full time. While most of the students at the Academy focus on still-life and portraiture in their work — and White does indeed do a fair number of portraits — it is landscape painting that ultimately inspires him.

“In Florence, I go every weekend to the seashore,” admits White. “I get thirsty — being brought up on the water. I come from a background of landscape painters and find it very nice to paint beach scenes — even in November the beaches are beautiful and picturesque. That’s the kind of scenes in Italy I find interesting.”

White explains that his European seascapes are very much inspired by the 19th century French Impressionist Eugène Boudin,

“He painted ports of France and these wonderful beach scenes,” notes White. “I knew it would be difficult, but I thought I would try, to do something near to what he was doing.”

“Once, I was painting by a British painter in St. Tropez,” adds White. “He was doing figures and he said, ‘Nelson, you’re trying to do the impossible.’ I said, ‘Boudin did it,’ and he said, ‘Yes, but he was Boudin.’”

Despite the exchange, White considers these works to be some of his most successful, and he finds the Academy’s classical methods very useful when applied to landscape work. He feels that the Academy’s intensive focus on drawing and color skills has made them second nature — which allows him to focus more intently on the work at hand.

“The art training is very much like what went on in France in the 1880s — even Childe Hassam and [Willard] Metcalf — they had the classic training, which made it possible for them to express themselves in the way that they wanted in landscape,” says White.

When asked if his work bears a resemblance to either his father or grandfather, White resends; “It’s interesting, there has always been a strong similarity in my work and that of my grandfather and father. I admired them both greatly, but since going back to school, I think it’s now more similar to my grandfather.”

“His palette was more subdued — not so brilliant. My grandfather was a tonalist and impressionist both — now we’re more similar.”

“Shifting Sands,” paintings by Nelson H. White will be on view at the Grenning Gallery (90 Main Street, Sag Harbor) through July 31. For more information, call 725-8469.

---

Nelson H. White: “Shifting Sands,” at Grenning Gallery, 90 Main Street, Sag Harbor.

 

By Joan Baum of The Independent

  

It’s not just the sands that shift from picture to picture in Nelson White’s colorful, impressionistic oils but the beaches – Shelter Island, Southampton,  the Bahamas, the Riviera, Italian and French – though one of the pleasures of this one-man show is guessing where Nelson White was standing as he gazed out on his favorite subject matter  – water, coastlines, sailboats, sky. Does it matter which shores prompted what painting? Not really.  Thought the Mashomack Point pictures seem to share views and pallete colors, the bold-colored umbrella beach scenes could be of Dune Road as easily as of Lido di Camaiore. The Grenning Gallery encourages this generic sense of Nelson White’s en plein air ground by arranging his pictures – both downstairs and up – so that the European scenes are interspersed with the East End pictures and in many cases are identified only by labels that indicate locale. This lack of ready recognition causes the viewer to concentrate on Nelson White’s style, particularly his brushwork and tones.

 

Of course,  this being summer, it doesn’t hurt to feature Nelson White’s locally inspired work, which comes to him naturally because he has a home on Shelter Island.  Indeed, his  roots in that house go back to the days his artist grandfather, Henry Cooke White built it and painted in it, when he wasn’t attending to the art colony he founded at Old Lyme, or painting in Waterford, Connecticut. It was also on Shelter Island that grandson Nelson Holbrook White (NHW) fell under the influence of his artist and writer father, Nelson Cooke White, who was exploring American impressionist techniques, particularly those of Dwight Tryon (“the beauty is in the half tones”), Thomas Dewing and Childe Hassam. So NHW comes to his love of local land and sea not only naturally but perhaps inevitably. There’s something about those Whites!  After years preparing for a career as a violinist, NHW decided to take up the family profession and pursue the kind of painting his grandfather and father had instilled in him. Not too long ago the generations were given a celebratory exhibition in Greenwich called “The Whites: Three Generations of Connecticut Impressionists and Their Mentors” (www.greenwichlibrary.org). Program photos show the three artists at work – grandfather sitting before a fireplace, contemplating a few of his landscapes; father, in his studio, brush and palette in hand, looking with intensity toward the camera; and a young NHW, painting away in and on his element – the water.

 

With few exceptions, pieces done from photographs in the Atlantis Aquarium in the Bahamas, NHW has always painted en plein air, sometimes surprising himself at the speed with which a scene worked its magic on him. The lovely Sunrise, Sea and Sky, for example, took only 45 minutes, though the sureness of White’s brushstrokes and the complex hues he evoked in his sun-streaked sky and water might suggest hours. NHW, however, knows this scene because it’s like so many others he has done with the same basic composition: horizontal planes of sky, water and land.  A guess at locale in Sunrise turns out to be incorrect –the scene is Italy, where NHW now spends nine months of the year, studying at the Florence Academy of Art. (Incidentally, Pisa is the source of the unusual frames NHW has handmade, textured rectangles that tend to extend his lines and moods of the paintings.

 

The inclusion of several portraits in the show reflects 73-year old White’s longtime apprenticeship under Pietro Annigoni and Nerima Simi, and while they make pleasant additions to the landscapes, they seem more academic set pieces next to the shimmering landscapes and the impressionist /abstract beach scenes, especially those such as Dune Sunset, a large landscape in the upstairs gallery that he conceived as a watercolor and that he therefore executed using thinned-out oil paint. On your way to see the art film at the Sag Harbor Cinema next door to Grenning, tack slightly and check out the Nelson Whites. The exhibit runs through July 31.