About Nina
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Nina Whidden is an experienced portrait artist working in oils, pastels, silverpoint, and graphite. She is a Signature Member of the Rochester Art Club, one of the oldest continually active professional art orginazitions in the United States. From the beginning she received widespread acclaim for her sensitive and moving portraits. From an early age she was fascinated with drawing and realistic rendering.
“The first time I remember really ‘getting’ the idea of realistic drawing happened when I was a young child. My father, an engineer by trade, learned the art of hand drafting. When I was about 7 years old I learned how to draw a cylinder. It was the one we all learn to draw with two circles and two lines on the outside edges connecting them. He took that page and showed me how, with subtle shading, to make that cylinder look like a three-dimensional pier. Watching that pier come into being was like magic! He then added some simple gulls and suddenly we had a beautiful beach scene. It was at that moment representational art began to make sense to me.”
Later, she made her first attempts at portraits. Although the first attempts were clearly rough, she already showed an aptitude for capturing some essential emotional characteristic in the model’s face. She quickly gained renown for her ability to really connect to her subjects and make the viewer experience a strong emotional response as well.
“I love being able to connect on an emotional level with my subjects. It’s all in the eyes. If the eyes are lifeless, the whole portrait will be. The eyes being the window to the soul is never a truer idiom than when you’re talking about portrait art. I am very sensitive to people by nature and that helps me empathize with my subjects. A good portrait artist has to have empathy with their subjects to breathe life into them and to add that extra ‘spark‘ that is ripe with character.”
Although she is disabled due to multiple sclerosis, she has learned how to work around it and it's important to her that people know, particularly those who may be newly diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease, that it isn't the end of the world and a person can move forward and succeed. Any serious diagnosis such as MS can be profoundly frightening.
Nina Whidden welcomes all inquiries. Contact information is provided at the bottom of each page as well as through the “Contact the Artist” link to the left. Please take a moment to sign up for her email newsletter. It is a monthly publication devoted to both the artist and the art lover in all of us. In addition to monthly articles related to art, periodically special offers and discounts are made available only to subscribers. Your email address is confidential and will never be distributed or sold to any other entity.
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