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Southwest Art Magazine | Norman Kolpas | April/ May 2023 Issue
This story was featured in the April/ May 2023 issue of Southwest Art magazine. View select articles from the Southwest Art April/ May 2023 Issue on their website – then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss a single story again.
Over Father’s Day weekend in 2015, three of four grown sons took him on a fishing trip to Florida that had them road tripping along the Gulf Coast from Pannell’s home in Dallas, Texas. “They were taking care of me,” he says with quiet pride, “and one of the boys was driving.”
Pannell pauses for mock-dramatic effect, and a chuckle rises as his mind casts back to the passing scenery. “If you’ve ever driven across the Gulf Coast, it’s pretty boring,” he says, and waits an other beat before continuing, “but there are clouds to be had. So I started looking through the windshield at the sky, and the moist air that comes off the Gulf creates these huge, huge cumulus clouds. And I thought, ‘Wow!”‘
A bystander observing similar celestial phenomena might almost think of what Pannell beheld that day as landscapes in the sky. That is, too, how Pannell came to regard the clouds as he snapped photographs—a reference gathering process he continues regularly whenever he comes across glorious land and sky formations. Back home in his studio, Pannell sorts through his photos, selects those that demand to become his subjects and finetunes them in Photoshop. He’ll print out an image with a grid superimposed with brush and paint, the basic composition onto one of the large-format canvases he rightly feels befits the grandeur of his subjects. His favorite painting sizes now range from 3-foot squares to as expansive as 4 by 5 feet.
Starting at one corner of the canvas, Pannell will “fill in the blanks.” He works from darker to lighter tones of paint and moves around the surface as he strives to complete a painting while “maintaining a balance of values and colors.” Sometimes, he admits, “It’s hard to know when to stop, because you tend to want to fiddle with this and fiddle with that. Finally, I say, ‘I’ve got to quit!’ I’ll walk away from the painting for a day or so. And then I’ll come back to it and think, ‘Hey, that’s pretty good. I think I’ll let it go.”‘
Of course, “pretty good” for Pannell equates to beyond exceptional for many others in his field. That’s because the 74-year-old artist brings to his work not just a lifelong love of making art, but also more than 50 years of professional experience in graphic design and illustration.
Pannell fondly recalls a moment from his early childhood that may have foretold the kind of creative life ahead of him. He was not yet a kindergartener in the early 1950s when his family moved from his native Chicago to west Texas (a perfect opportunity for his father, who was in the oil and gas business). One day, when he was a child, Pannell was taking in the world from the passenger seat of a pickup truck as his father drove on his rounds. He noticed that new cars had bright colors, while most of the older cars where painted similar shades of black as was customary in previous decades. He asked his father why those cars were black, and “my dad said they were old. In my child’s mind, I thought that all cars metamorphosed into that one color as they got older. So I guess that was my first leap of imagination.”