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Happy with crayons
Robin Purnell has been an artist since childhood.
“I don’t really remember this, but y grandmother tells me that she used to take me to a cabin (in the Massachusetts countryside near Boston) that my great-grandfather had built. We’d go in the winter, hike in on snowshoes. It would be freezing cold, and the cabin was heated with wood. My grandmother would start a fire, and while we were waiting for it to get warm, she’d give me crayons and paper, and I’d be perfectly content to sit on the cold floor and draw. ”
The little girl in the snowsuit coloring on the cabin floor grew up to go to school at the Massachusetts College of Art and became an abstract painter. In her junior year, she studied on Samos Island in Greece.
Her teacher convinced Purnell that “realism is more valid than abstraction in our society.” Then began a five year struggle to “draw, paint and see reality again...to remastei* those forgotten skills.”
Her husband’s transfer to Liberia helped.
“It was the perfect place to take off, to investigate realism. It was so colorful, the people were so beautiful. They didn’t wear many clothes, so I could see a lot of the body, how it worked, how it moved,” Purnell recalled.
She had her first solo show at the American Ambassador’s home, some 40 pieces, all paintings and drawings of West Africa.
“Everything sold in 20 minutes! I was so pleased — and astonished. Then, for my second show, people were waiting outside a half hour before it opened. I was overwhelmed. I still am,” Purnell admitted. “As an
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