Nan Tull, a longtime artist ‘of true feeling based on experience,’ at 85
An artist whose work evolved again and again, Nan Tull found herself at a difficult juncture in the mid-1980s. A beloved dog died. She had endured illness and surgery. All that upheaval, however, proved beneficial for her work.
“Painting is an old person’s game,” she told the Globe in 1986. “It’s about your experience in life. As much as I would have liked to have been a painter at 22, I don’t think I had much to say then.”
She had plenty to say in that interview, just days after turning 49, and she spoke even more forcefully in the art she had created after overcoming challenge after challenge.
“This string of catastrophes three years ago led to work that was life-affirming rather than morbid,” Globe art critic Christine Temin wrote in the 1986 profile. “The exuberant watercolors she had done for a decade gave way first to a series of hundreds of charcoal drawings, and finally to large diptychs and triptychs.”
Ms. Tull, whose work is part of permanent collections in museums from Boston to Palo Alto, Calif., died July 4. She was 85 and lived in Boston.
For years “encaustic has been my painting medium,” she wrote in the artist’s statement on her website of the material in which hot wax is dosed with pigment.
“My paintings are constructed by pouring or painting with brushes to create multiple, often translucent layers that can be filled in, scraped down, carved, piled up, heated to a smooth as satin surface, or worked in a textural impasto approach,” Ms. Tull wrote.
In March, Globe art critic Cate McQuaid reviewed Ms. Tull’s encaustic works at the Soprafina Gallery.
“In a texture luscious as fondant, ‘Boneyard Series’ makes abstractions of bony shapes — skulls, spines,” Cate McQuaid wrote.
“Their fluid lines and archetypal simplicity recall Matisse’s plant cutouts,” McQuaid wrote. “It’s hard to tell whether white went on first or whether black did, so spatially foreground and background appear to toggle. What seemed like a simple figure/ground relationship is more mysterious.”
Of a 2012 show at the Mills Gallery in Boston Center for the Arts, titled “The Future of the Past: Encaustic Art in the 21st Century,” McQuaid wrote that Ms. Tull’s “refreshingly abstract ‘Night Vision 3 is bold, gritty, and black and white, with jagged diagonals colliding.”
In 2009, what is now the Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University hosted the retrospective “Nan Tull: Sensuous Wisdom, 19842009, Twenty-Five Years of Painting and Drawing.”
“As an artist, Tull envisions moments of true feeling based on experience,” Katherine French, then the museum’s director, wrote in the exhibition’s catalog. “As viewers, we are wiser for that.”
The wisdom Ms. Tull passed along to viewers through her art was hard won. In one instance, an amaryllis a friend gave her when she was hospitalized became both an art subject and a metaphor.
“I was intent on conveying a message about the cycles of life, that with every death there is a rebirth,” she told Temin in 1986. “That is particularly obvious with plant life.”
Born in Washington, D.C., on July 15, 1937, Nannie Harrison Tull was a daughter of Colonel Lloyd Harrison Tull, who had served in the Army Air Forces, and Ellen Louise “Dade” Warfield Tull.
One of two sisters, she was known as Nan. After high school in Clemson, S.C., she went to Wellesley College, from which she graduated with a bachelor’s degree.
In subsequent years, she received a master’s from Stanford University, along with a fourthyear diploma and a fifth-year certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
During her junior year at Wellesley, she lived in Paris, studied at Ecole du Louvre in Paris, and became fluent in French.
“For the rest of her life she was proud of the fact that she had studied in France and could speak wonderful French,” said her husband, Frank Wezniak.
At the Louvre, Ms. Tull often saw students make their own copies of original art. One day she watched a young woman create an expanded abstraction inspired by the corner of a painting by the 16th-century Italian artist Tiziano Vecellio, who was known as Titian.
That experience inspired Ms. Tull to believe in power of invention, and “made it possible for her to become a creative person,” French wrote in the Danforth exhibition catalog.
In 1959, Ms. Tull married Frank John Wezniak, a business executive whose work over the years took them and their children to places including California and Tennessee before the family settled in Concord for many years.
The couple, who had met on a blind date when she was a Wellesley senior and he was attending Harvard Business School, traveled extensively. “We counted up that we’d been to 70 countries,” he said.
“She really enjoyed her work,” he said. “She enjoyed the creativity of it and her relationships with other artists.”
Among the artists with whom she became friends was Ruth Fields of Cambridge. The two were part of the Studio 249 A Street Artists Cooperative in Fort Point.
“Since her death, so many of the younger members of the coop have said to me how encouraging she was, how she always stopped to see how they were,” Fields said. “I feel that she was a very positive force for younger artists, for perseverance in art, for helping people to see what a life in art could be, along with a very vigorous personal life. She had children, she loved tennis, she was committed to friendship.”
In addition to her husband, Ms. Tull leaves a daughter, Patricia Webster of Plymouth; a son, Doug of Houston; and two grandchildren.
A service was held in Boston’s Old South Church and burial was in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.
“She was diligent — so disciplined and so diligent. And she despaired of those of us who were not quite so diligent,” Fields said.
That devotion, and the work Ms. Tull produced, drew praise throughout her career.
In a 1983 review of oil on paper artwork at the Clark Gallery in Lincoln, Temin praised Ms. Tull’s “compositions of zigzags, triangles and archways that suggest plans for an imaginary architecture.”
Eleven years later, before Ms. Tull had turned fully to encaustic, Temin reviewed her work at the Boston Public Library’s galleries in Copley Square.
Ms. Tull, Temin wrote, handled “charcoal, pastel, and graphite with bold authority, creating large-scale single images that sometimes threaten to burst the bounds of the paper.”
Through her art, Ms. Tull wanted “her audience ‘to be more open to seeing what they wouldn’t have noticed before,’ ” French wrote in the Danforth retrospective exhibition catalog.
Ms. Tull “is a compassionate person,” French wrote.
“As a young woman walking through the Louvre, she was able to identify the person she might become by observing the creative process of another,” French wrote. “A dying amaryllis helped her know ‘that there could be something we leave, some record of a time that propels us into the future.’”