Nancy Edmonds Hanson
hansonnanc@gmail.com

“I believe that everybody is artistic,” says Barbara Benda Nagle. “It’s not that people can’t create art. The challenge is in the practice. Making art must become a habit.”
Perhaps that is the secret of Barbara’s regional reputation, … that, and the inspiration that lies – and flies – all around her. “I love anything nature-oriented,” she observes. “I have a penchant for birds, but when I get on another topic, I’m all over it.”
That explains much about her Mourning Dove Studio in north Moorhead. Watercolor cardinals and chickadees may perch all over the bright, sunny rooms, but other creatures peek out as well. Bison large and small roam the area, along with landscape of badlands and lakeshores. Lately, she confesses, she has been fascinated by … walleyes.
Barbara’s joy lies not only in her own watercolor, acrylic and mixed media paintings, but in what has become her life’s work: Teaching others the techniques and insights they can employ to unlock their own artistic abilities. After 35 years of teaching young people in the classroom, she graduated in 2014 to intense workshops for adults and older teens. From her popular classes for Moorhead Community Education to multi-day art immersion events from Medora, North Dakota, to Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin, the diminutive Wahpeton native has opened the hundreds eyes of students convinced they can’t sketch so much as a straight line.
“Some will keep it up and get better and better. Others will let it slide,” she reflects. “What’s important is that they’ll see the world around them in a new way.
“See it. Feel it. Draw it,” she prescribes in the classroom, instructing her followers to trace the outlines of an object without looking at their work in just one continuous line. “Don’t put your pencil down until you can see what you’re trying to to create in your mind’s eye. It’s a way to draw on the visual ability of the right side of your brain – to escape your inner critic that tears you down.”
And practice, practice, practice. “I have to paint every single day,” she says. “Otherwise I’m a terrible crab. Just ask my husband!” (Paul Nagle, who works for Health Care Accessories, was not available to confirm or dispute her assessment.)
Barbara and her twin sister Bev, who’s also an artist, began drawing from the first days they could scribble. The youngest pair of eight sisters (with Barbara the older by 22 minutes), they were known as the artistic type from their earliest days in school. Raised in a bubblegum-pink house by their widowed mother Katherine, they flourished under her sheltering wing. “She saw something in us,” Barbara remembers. “There wasn’t much money for art supplies, but she made sure we had a supply of scratch paper – the backs of envelopes, the blank side of bills – and a 24-crayon set of colors. She’d cut out an illustration or a photo and say, ‘Here – draw this.’ And of course she always assured us we did wonderful work.”
Her mother, too, had “something special,” she says, though the need to raise and support her family left her little time to pursue it. “Every few months, Mom would clear the dining room table, lay down fabric with pictures on it, and run the tip of a glue bottle over the lines on the picture. She would then sprinkle glitter over the lines. We always begged her to let us do it. Mom said she needed to do it by herself, but we could watch. Mom’s ‘glitter art’ decorated our house instead of the pictures she couldn’t afford to buy.
Though diminutive, at just 4 feet 10 inches, the Benda twins were natural athletes. Both competed through high school and beyond in softball, racquetball and tennis. “We were small, but we could throw and hit a ball,” she says. They played softball at Minnesota State University and won state titles in the Raquel sports. The wear and tear of “life as a gym rat,” as Barbara describes it, over the years took a toll on her knees and shoulders. Fresh off a shoulder repair, she looks forward to golf next summer. Long a competitor on the greens as well, she says she’s now slowed down to simply enjoying the sport.
Barbara and her twin went in different directions after college. While Bev, who lives in Grand Forks, concentrated on dietetics and life coaching, Barbara focused on education. “I started out in art education. Mom was happy I enjoyed it, but kept asking me, ‘How are you going to get a job?’” She finally majored in elementary education and minored in art education. Then she put her skills to work in middle school classrooms. She taught art to 4th through 8th graders for 15 years at the Wahpeton Indian School, then moved to Fargo, where she taught 5th graders for a dozen years before focusing again on art for another eight.
That’s where her encouraging approach to reaching every student took root. She has developed a curriculum for beginning drawing she calls “Seeing Things Differently.” She emphasizes recognizing the shapes in every subject the artist tackles, really seeing the foundation beneath the feathers or fur or whatever first meets the eye on the outside. Her focus is on composition and the interplay of light and dark. Those who find a love of art through her positive, supportive guidance in sketching may move on to watercolor and other media.
Serious students – whether rank beginners, rusty artists coming back to their palettes or experienced pros looking for new insights and directions – can enroll in a long list of 2020 workshops. Her next five-day workshop on beginning drawing and watercolor takes place Jan. 6-10 at the North Dakota State College of Science campus north of the FargoDome. As the year rolls along, she’ll be teaching again at Dillman’s Resort in Wisconsin. She has held workshops at Medora, too. In the meantime, she’s on the schedule again with three classes for Moorhead Community Ed in February, including one that features her feathered favorites, “Let’s Sketch Birds.”
Barbara and sister Bev, who likes birds, too, were featured at Wahpeton’s Red Door Gallery last summer in an exhibition titled “Twintuition.” “Bev is the only other person I can paint with,” Barbara says of their painting forays, often outdoors. “Other people talk too much, and I really need to focus.”
While she works in other media, including pure fluorescent paints that bring her bison portraits to life under a black light, Barbara’s favorite is the watercolors that bring most of her birds and landscapes to evocative life. “I love watercolor because it’s portable. I always take my watercolors on trips,” she says. Whether her destination is Minneapolis, Mexico or Maine, she can be spotted painting the life around her.
Though she’s helped thousands of students, young and old, discover their inner art over the years, Barbara describes herself, first and foremost, as a lifelong learned. She returned to MSUM at 50 to complete that long-delayed major in art education. She praises the teachers who inspired her there, among them Trygve Olson, Zhimin Guan and Carl Oltvedt. Olson, she says, was a role model: “He has the best work ethic for sketching of anyone I know. He’s in a league of his own.” She has taken painting workshops, too, from more than 30 professional artists all over the region. “There’s always more to learn,” she insists.
The right time to begin? “As young as possible. As soon as you can hold a crayon,” she recommends. “I’m concerned about the effect of technology on children. Instead of scribbing and coloring, too many of them seem to be watching screens. The brain is activated in entirely different ways when you’re actively doing, instead of passively learning.” In other words: “See it. Feel it. Draw it.”
For more information on Barbara’s art and upcoming workshops, visit her website, barbarabendanagle.com.