Dick Nelson

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Dick Nelson is the teacher who deconstructed my sense of color. After his 8 week course I was for the first time able to look at colors and begin to understand how much of the three primaries each contained. I was able to understand how luminosity was created by combining colors of similar families. He taught me about halation.

Dick Nelson grew up in Hawai‘i, and after graduating from Yale University, returned home to become Chairman of the Art Department at Punahou High School in Honolulu. For 22 years, he taught everything from life drawing to art history, and of course, his passion, watercolor.

“It’s the quality of luminosity which intrigues me, and my love of seeing through one color to another, ” explains Nelson.

He is creator of the now famous Tri-Hue watercolor technique, wherein all the colors on the finished painting emerge by mixing only three colors on the palette. Since his retirement over 25 years ago, he has made Maui his home and continued his passion for education, becoming both teacher and mentor to a generation of Maui artists. [more]

Some words on Dick Nelson:

...one of Maui's most respected artists...
... a brilliant colour guru who pontificates from a high volcano on Maui.
...opened up my mind to new ways of looking at the world
...one of Hawaii’s greatest painters and teachers

He recently taught a workshop in Hilo. His greatest claim to fame may however be that he is the second most senior alumni to share honors with Barack Obama as a distinguished alumn of Punahou High School where he taught art.

How I met Barack Obama's sister Maya

Last summer, in August of 2007, we had a huge anti-war art show with almost 100 artists who put up over 200 works of art for a month.

The show was called "War and Peace".

One morning days into the show, while we were hanging out in the sun room, someone said that Barack Obama's sister was in town campaigning. Everyone in the room got excited.

"Let's invite her over!"

She was able to come to the show and walk through spending almost a half hour with us. She really enjoyed it. She even said that as a school teacher she would love to use some of our art in her classroom.

This picture is in the children's studio. Over six hundred works of art from children around Maui covered the walls. The art had been made as a gift to the Dalai Lama who had visited the month before.

She was very cool-- open, sweet, intelligent, present and radiant. It was easy for me to believe, that she was family to something big, something powerful, something we haven't seen in a long time.