Artist Adapting To Health Challenge

When Don Nepean sa down in front of his easel three years ago, he was, for the first time in his half-century career as an artist, scared to paint.

Because of a pair of debilitating strokes in the spring of 1992, the paint brush in his hand felt like it was made of lead. His characteristic style - sharp brush strokes and a realism showing his training as a commercial artist - had escaped him, just as had the names of his grandchildren and the letters of the alphabet.

Since then, Nepean has rediscovered the talent that had earned him a position as dean of the Spokane Falls Community College art department.

To compensate for less brush control, Nepean picked up new, unconventional tools - a sander, a putty knife, a roller. He began working the edges of his creative envelope, creating loose, free-form works by adding layers and layers of paint, then cutting through them in places and sanding them to a porcelain-smooth finish.

The result is complex canvases that hint of forms and pictures. But rather than showing and detailing outlined forms, Nepean’s new works wade through them.

“I didn’t have control, but with the other materials, I could still feel the subject,” said Nepean.

“People can relate to (the new style), but they are not being told what it is.”

He has now regained much of his hand control, and recently he completed a watercolor landscape in what used to be his trademark style. But Nepean said his creative journey has made him a better artist.

“I always tell people if working a different direction … pulls something out of you that you wouldn’t get otherwise, it is better to go that way than go with a preconceived formula,” said Nepean.

His former colleagues agree.

“His style was very controlled, organized. There was a hard-edged, controlled quality,” said Ken Keefer, a former SFCC art instructor who retired in 1994. “But things now are very spontaneous.

“The recent work suggests landscapes, but landscapes of the mind.”

Nepean’s speech is still marked by the characteristic drag of a stroke victim. He forgets phone numbers, particularly when companies use a catchy series of letters instead of numbers. And he still is, as he has been his entire life, mostly colorblind.

“You can see it in the bright colors I use,” said Nepean. “I can’t distinguish the subtlties of greens and reds.”

To relearn his style, Nepean the teacher had to take some lessons from himself.

“When you teach, you give all the things you like to do yourself (to) people,” he said. “If you are a good teacher, you try to let all your ideas out to people.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo