Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, January 13, 2022: Nancy Stahl, an American illustrator (#1469w)

Nancy Stahl is an illustrator who lives in New York City. She attended Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and also studied at School of Visual Arts. She has worked in a career split equally between traditional media and digitally created art. In 1989 she was introduced to post-production work on a Quantel Paintbox and was also invited to Adobe’s headquarters to test a pre-release of the original Photoshop. She began to work exclusively on the computer two years later.

Nancy’s assignments have ranged from editorial work for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine to corporate identity, packaging and advertising for diverse companies including: The Disney Family Museum, Stonyfield Farms, Time-Life Music, and the National Parks Service. She has also created work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and the US Postal Service, which has used over thirty-five of her illustrations on postage stamps. Her work is represented in The Illustrator in America, Rolling Stone: The Illustrated Portraits, and 50 Years of Illustration.

In 2012, Nancy was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. An instructor at the University of Hartford, she has also taught at Syracuse University, School of Visual Arts, and Fashion Institute of Technology. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad.

It took a little convincing for some of Stahl’s clients to make the switch with her to digital, but once they did, there was no turning back. Once again her renown grew along with her new passion. Her work was being used in corporate identity, on packaging, in international publications such as Der Spiegel, and in the late ’90s, she got her first assignment to do a U.S. postage stamp. It was the beginning of a long and successful relationship during which she created more than 16 stamps, with eight billion copies of her egret stamp in circulation.

In Nancy’s words: “How do you explore, if you don’t do things that people don’t like? If I listened to people, I’d never try anything, and I’d never grow. Getting paid for this stuff is good, but it’s the growing that’s important.”

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