Eileen Nistler, Crimson to Violet, colored pencil, 11 x 24.
Followers of the annual Artistic Excellence competition may experience a satisfying sense of déjà vu upon seeing Eileen Nistler’s third place CRIMSON TO VIOLET. Six years ago, she received an honorable mention for A STUDY OF BEETS. “Since that time,” she says, “I’ve grown beets, I’ve bought them at local markets, and I really knew that I liked them and wanted to pursue another painting of them.”
Nistler uses the word “painting” for her colored-pencil artworks because, she explains, the surface of the eight-ply museum board to which she applies her medium “is fully saturated with color”—up to two dozen layers in some areas, applied freehand over the course of about 60 hours of work. “I do track my hours,” she adds, “as that’s part of my training as an architect.” She had pursued that career for a decade in Albuquerque, NM, before coming home 21 years ago to live in the house her grandfather built 30 years before her birth on the family’s northeastern Wyoming cattle ranch.
Soon after her return, she picked up the colored pencils she had used as an architect after a friend in a local art class showed her a work in that medium by renowned western portraitist Carrie Ballantyne. “It was an epiphany,” she says. Nistler began winning awards for her realistic portrayals of mostly plant-world subjects endowed with a voluptuous depth of value that bespeaks her admiration for Flemish Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens. “You can see through one layer of pencil to the other colors underneath,” she says. “It adds so much drama.”
Find Nistler’s work at Deselms Fine Art, Cheyenne, WY; Expressions Art Gallery & Framing, Sheridan, WY; Wyoming In Color, Buffalo, WY; Wyoming Art & Frame, Gillette, WY; 1875 Gallery, Sundance, WY; ArtForms Gallery, Hill City, SD; and www.eileennistler.com.
This story appeared in the December 2022/January 2023 issue of Southwest Art magazine.