Landscapes in the Sky

The clouds and earthly forms featured in Cap Pannell’s paintings brim with glorious color and light.

by Norman Kolpas

Over Father’s Day weekend in 2015, three of four grown sons took him on a fishing trip to Florida that had them road tripping along the Gulf Coast from Pannell’s home in Dallas, Texas. “They were taking care of me,” he says with quiet pride, “and one of the boys was driving.”

Pannell pauses for mock-dramatic effect, and a chuckle rises as his mind casts back to the passing scenery. “If you’ve ever driven across the Gulf Coast, it’s pretty boring,” he says, and waits an­ other beat before continuing, “but there are clouds to be had. So I started looking through the windshield at the sky, and the moist air that comes off the Gulf creates these huge, huge cumulus clouds. And I thought, ‘Wow!”‘

A bystander observing similar celestial phenomena might almost think of what Pannell beheld that day as landscapes in the sky. That is, too, how Pannell came to regard the clouds as he snapped photographs—a reference gathering process he continues regularly whenever he comes across glorious land and sky formations. Back home in his studio, Pannell sorts through his photos, selects those that demand to become his subjects and finetunes them in Photoshop. He’ll print out an image with a grid superimposed with brush and paint, the basic composition onto one of the large-format canvases he rightly feels befits the grandeur of his subjects. His favorite painting sizes now range from 3-foot squares to as expansive as 4 by 5 feet.

Starting at one corner of the canvas, Pannell will “fill in the blanks.” He works from darker to lighter tones of paint and moves around the surface as he strives to complete a painting while “maintaining a balance of values and colors.” Sometimes, he admits, “It’s hard to know when to stop, because you tend to want to fiddle with this and fiddle with that. Finally, I say, ‘I’ve got to quit!’ I’ll walk away from the painting for a day or so. And then I’ll come back to it and think, ‘Hey, that’s pretty good. I think I’ll let it go.”‘

Of course, “pretty good” for Pannell equates to beyond exceptional for many others in his field. That’s because the 74-year-old artist brings to his work not just a lifelong love of making art, but also more than 50 years of professional experience in graphic design and illustration.

Pannell fondly recalls a moment from his early childhood that may have foretold the kind of creative life ahead of him. He was not yet a kindergartener in the early 1950s when his family moved from his native Chicago to west Texas (a perfect opportunity for his father, who was in the oil and gas business). One day, when he was a child, Pannell was taking in the world from the passenger seat of a pickup truck as his father drove on his rounds. He noticed that new cars had bright colors, while most of the older cars where painted similar shades of black as was customary in previous decades. He asked his father why those cars were black, and “my dad said they were old. In my child’s mind, I thought that all cars metamorphosed into that one color as they got older. So I guess that was my first leap of imagination.”

Those leaps grew greater in school. During second grade, his teacher grew fed up with his constant doodling on the blackboard next to his desk and thought she’d put him on the spot by asking him to draw something for the class. “Disney had just done a thing on space travel, so I started drawing a spaceship, saying ‘OK, here are the fuel tanks, and here’s the exhaust. Here’s where the pilot sits, and here’s the escape module, etc.’ And I sat back down,” he recalls. “Looking back now, that was my first presentation.” Soon, his talents were in demand during lunch and on the playground, as his fellow students would ask him to draw battleships, jet planes or horses. “I was the go-to guy,” he says of talents that continued to grow through primary and secondary school years that otherwise saw him reading or playing trombone in the band.

He majored in graphic design at North Texas State University in Denton, just north of Dallas, where his studies required their share of drawing and painting classes. “Some of the fine art teachers, seeing I could do that, were asking me to change my major, but I was committed,” Pannell says. Right out of college, he was hired by a leading graphic design firm in Dallas. There, he honed his skills and built his resume before eventually founding his own graphic design and illustration firm. It later evolved into the multidisciplinary agency Pannell St. George that was founded with his wife and copywriter, Carol St. George. The agency was dedicated to creating advertising, corporate and institutional collateral materials, direct-mail pieces and brand identities for a wide variety of clients.

In that capacity, Pannell evolved into a respected illustrator who created images for companies and organizations as diverse as the University of Notre Dame, Grace Church in Dallas, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Dallas Morning News, Southern Methodist University, the Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs and the U.S. Postal Service. Eventually, though, that highly creative process felt more and more like a grind. “Being a designer-illustrator is a juggling act,” he observes. “You have to produce a product that appeals to a client and, at the same time, provides a sense of satisfaction. There is also the demand of meeting a deadline, which is sacred. If you miss it, a client will probably never hire you again. And a lot of times, I’d have to change things. I was so tired of that.”

Then, in 2010, he and Carol ran into an old friend who told him about charcoal drawing classes he was taking at a small art school in east Dallas. Pannell began taking painting classes with live models there. “I had not touched a paintbrush since college,” he says. Not long after, he found another instructor at Southern Methodist University who led plein air painting trips. Though the idea of painting in the open air appealed to him in practicality, Pannell found the process overwhelming. He explains, “It was just too much for me to take in, so I started to shoot photo references, and that’s what worked for me.”

Eventually, the Gulf Coast road trip with his sons proved a turning point. He says, ”I’d post my paintings on Facebook and Instagram. And if people liked them, that was my barometer.” Eventually, a Santa Fe gallery took no­ tice of his postings and invited him to show his works there. More recently, he achieved representation at respected galleries in Nashville, Tennessee, and Aspen-adjacent Basalt, Colorado.

Today, Pannell has completely changed his creative working life. “I really am not doing graphic design anymore unless a great assignment were to come up. And I do illustration if I like the assignment,” he says. Meanwhile, Pannell brings to his relatively new fine art career a practicality born of half a century of serving clients. He notes, “Painting is a commercial endeavor, so someone has to be attracted to your work to buy it. You have to consider what to paint that will appeal to a buyer.”

Fortunately, his landscapes and skyscapes appeal greatly to avid collectors who are happy to find their spirits lifted into the heavens.

contact information
www.cappannell.com

representation
Ann Korologos Gallery, Basalt, CO, www.korologosgallery.com
Bennett Galleries, Nashville, TN, www.bennettgalleriesnashville.com

This story appeared in the April/May 2023 issue of Southwest Art magazine.

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