Art gallery

Digital pioneer Nancy Stahl began her love of exploration when she was in high school, where, as the second best artist in her class, she drew posters for plays and events, and spent long hours in her room creating and experimenting with everything from encaustic painting to oils to pen and ink.
After attending a large university for two years, Stahl transferred to Art Center College of Design. There she discovered that a strong sense of competition was a great motivator for her, as she and her classmates pulled all-nighters to complete their assignments and met up for eggs and toast in the morning to compare their work before class.

Paul Hardy, Stahl’s close friend until his death in 2001, left Art Center in 1970 to move to New York City, where he worked with Tony Russell and Kit and Linda Hinrichs at the newly-formed Russell & Hinrichs Studio. When Stahl left school and moved to New York, she got regular freelance assignments from the studio, while holding down a day job in the garment district painting swatches of textile prints. In the early years of her freelance career, she worked in diverse styles and media to satisfy the wide range of the studio’s assignments. She expanded her client list, and after a couple of years she was able to go completely freelance.

She had become known—and popular—for her colored pencil work when she was inspired by the work of Ludwig Hohlwein. She developed a Hohlwein-inspired retro poster style on a gouache portrait of Clark Gable and promoted it to art directors. This was a turning point. With this new boldly graphic poster style, Stahl hit her stride and expanded her clientele beyond editorial work for magazines and newspapers.

Then, in 1985, an assignment to illustrate an article about the battle of the sexes within families gave her the inspiration for further exploration. This time she created an updated spin on Heroic Realism to express the domestic power struggle.

Stahl had always wanted to hit on a “formula” that would allow her to work without recreating herself for each assignment. The only problem was, she says, “As soon as I had the formula worked out, I didn’t want to do it anymore. I was bored. I had to force myself to do it, and it was really painful to do every assignment like the one before.” While she was struggling to find something new to make the assignments personally more interesting, she heard about an offer being made by a post-production company called Charlex. They invited illustrators to come after hours to learn how to create digital art on their big mainframe computers. This was in the late ’80s, when digital art was in its infancy, and Nancy decided to give it a go.

After her very first try at it, she was hooked. Left alone in the office after everyone but the cleaning crew had gone for the day, Stahl sat at the work station, “The next thing I knew it was five o’clock in the morning! I was completely wrapped up in it, it was so fantastic. I came home and slept for maybe an hour; I was going crazy with dreams of cutting things out and moving them around. I was so excited. I woke up and couldn’t wait to call them. Which I did, ‘I want to come back! I want to come back!’ I had felt so boxed in by the way I was working, and this was like magic: I could paint, I could draw, I could do line work, I could do anything I wanted it to do!”

Stahl was still painting in gouache to fulfill assignments for her freelance work. Once she was able to purchase a Mac, she taught herself a new process by creating the job digitally on her computer at the same time as she worked on the traditional painting, so she could see how to make her digital work look like her traditionally painted work. And that’s where she broke ground: her digital work looked the same as her traditional work; it had all the stark power and sophistication of the gouache paintings that had already made her a top-rung illustrator. Only now she was using a brand new tool with which to create and experiment.

This was in the early ’90s, at the very beginning of the digital revolution, and Stahl was in the forefront, breaking digital illustration ground, creating work that was as fluid and personal and as graphically powerful as the gouache paintings that had already made her famous. She had been invited out to Mountain View, California, by Adobe to test-drive the unreleased new program Photoshop; the inventors of the program Painter called and asked to visit her in her studio; she was featured in Communication Arts, Step-by-Step, Print, and Peachpit Press Illustrator Wow and Painter Wow books. Most of all, she was excited by the new ways of drawing and painting she was discovering and inventing.

“I would wake up every single day like it was Christmas morning, so excited to get on the computer. It was like falling in love, for real, after going on a lot of blind dates. It was all-consuming for me. I was up till four or five in the morning; I’d sleep for a couple of hours, and then I’d wake up with a start, ‘What if I tried this? What if I tried that?’ I could barely eat, I was so excited.”