Throughout adolescence in her native Vicksburg, Nancy Andrews Mitchell turned into a crafty kid.
While her mom crocheted, Mitchell embroidered.
“We’d sit in the front of the TV and sew,” she stated.
When she was 4 or five, Mitchell commenced drawing “girl whales” each time she had time on her young palms.
“My mother continually questioned how I knew they had been women,” the 64-year-antique Mitchell stated. “I’d laugh and say, ‘The eyelashes, of the path.”
When she was in the 5th or sixth grade, Mitchell and her mama made Christmas embellishes out of gown rings and velvet.
“We made them for all our instructors,” said the youngest of 4. “I turned into constantly doing cunning stuff.”
But in junior high, Mitchell stated she encountered “actual art” in the magnificence of art teacher Jean Blue.
“It changed into Jean who set me on the route for artwork,” she stated.
A lengthy-ago reminiscence makes Mitchell giggle.
“I recollect coming home from school in tenth or eleventh grade,” she said. “Daddy had a huge piece of plywood. I started to portray — swirly black shapes with pops of color. It changed in the ’60s. Daddy made a frame, and I gave it to my uncle, who stored it for all time.”
By 12th grade, Mitchell needed to decide what she turned into doing together with her existence.
Math turned into, without a doubt, not private electricity, she said. And she turned into no writer — “I could not spell, so that become out.”
She attended MUW (then Mississippi State College for Women) and declared herself an artwork principal.
Her college art classes seemed repetitive of what she’d found out in her junior excessive, and high faculty artwork training taught through Blue. Still, she stuck with artwork, transferring after a semester to Mississippi State University, where she subsequently graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in business artwork.
In high faculty, the young Nancy Andrews has been buddies with a younger guy named Charlie Mitchell, who’d graduated early and long gone directly to MSU.
Charlie Mitchell seemingly had determined — and shared with a few others — that he could date Andrews after they were in college and that he’d marry her one day. Mitchell contacted her early in her first and only semester on the W and asked her to the first State football sport of the season.
“I sort of remembered him,” Nancy Mitchell stated, laughing.
The date went well. “We talked and talked,” she said. “I turned into floating on air from the first date.”
There have been a few United States of America and downs in the courtship, but she standard his eventual tennis courtroom proposal, and they married in May 1974, while both were 19.
The two finally back to Vicksburg whereh he took a process at the Vicksburg Evening Post, and he or she worked for a time as an artist within the drafting branch at Waterways Experiment Station, wherein she changed to go with the flow arrows on the river charts.
After six months of government work, Mitchell started out taking steps to become licensed as an instructor.
Certification completed, she taught art for the final six weeks at essential schools. She taught a semester at the center school, then became an excessive school artwork trainer for a short time at Vicksburg High School. Most of her teaching became at Warren Central High School, where she shared her love of artwork with limitless students for 30 years.
During her time as a teacher, Mitchell was one of the first secondary artwork educators in Mississippi to gain National Board Certification and turned into Mississippi Art Educators Secondary Teacher of the Year in 2003-2004. She retired from Warren Central in 2012.
“I cherished excessive college,” she stated. “That changed into my location. I had a student who stated to me, ‘I’m going to primary in artwork,’ and I asked why. His answer changed into, ‘Because you simply appear to be you have a lot amusing.'”
Mitchell has former college students who are architects, picture designers, and at least one who is an artist who sells his paintings.
She has a passion for artwork education, even in retirement.
Mitchell has created “More Than A Painting” artwork instructions for folks that do not don’t forget themselves, artists.
She subscribes to the right brain, left brain idea which, truely positioned, is that people are either left or right-brain dominant. Analytical thinkers fall into the the left-minded class, whilst right-brainers tend to be greater innovative and creative.
A multimedia artist, Mitchell does now not limit her work to painting. She has worked with pen and ink and collage, as well. She creates her own carved sample stamps, which she uses to add intensity and texture to the artwork.
The right-mind dominant Mitchell is a examine in humility. She speedy downplays her inventive present, although the artwork thatis heads on the walls in her basement studio provides a compelling contradiction.
There is colorful artwork of animals, landscapes, and architecture.
