We are lucky to have an oral history video produced in 2013 by the Martha’s Vineyard Museum (MVM) of the late Nan Tull,85, who passed on July 4, 2023, discussing her shell studies produced over two years of beach combing all sides of the island.
In the video, Tull talks about admiring what is on those beaches. The artist’s version of what she saw is a translation of nature’s creations which she captured in both graphite and watercolor and labeled with common and Latin names, for example “common jingle” written in script next to “anomia simplex.” To my eyes, these studies provided the forms that become her visual language for large abstract drawings in charcoal and for encaustic works. Like Piet Mondrian’s tree drawings that evolved from illusion to allusion and finally expression, her late period works in charcoal, pastel and encaustic have a primordial beginning in her earlier works with shells, branches, flowers.
Tull closes the MVM video by explaining in a few words her Theory of the Universe: “God takes a formless mass and injects order.” In order, she claims, she finds calm. Tull’s interest in the duality of formlessness manipulated by order may be a lens that one can use to view her body of work.
The catalog produced for her “From the Beginning to the End” exhibition at the Anderson Yezerski Gallery, designed by Morgan Lacasse, includes 100 works Tull chose with her then studio manager, Bryan Smith, who is now the director of Nan Tull’s estate. Roughly 30 works will be on display but many others are available through the SoWa Boston gallery. A percentage of sales will be donated equally to the endowments in her name at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and the McDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.