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From BUA to MFA
Classical approach to art education suits SFA prodigy

By Hope Green

Anna Winestein was a junior at Boston University Academy when she knew that her art career had officially begun. A writer for American Artist magazine called her after he spotted her drawings posted on the Web site of a friend of her father's.

	Anna Winestein (BUA'00, SFA'03) in SFA's sophomore painting studio. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

"The reporter wanted to interview me on conté crayon techniques," she says. "He talked to me and another artist who exhibits and sells in New York, so for a 15-year-old it was quite overwhelming."

Now a BU sophomore, Winestein (BUA'00, SFA'03) is feeling more comfortable in the art world's big leagues. Last year one of her still life pastels, Rhapsody in Blue, was shown in Blue, a prestigious juried exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, and another pastel, A Summer Feast, appeared at a Manhattan gallery as part of an exhibition of the American Artists Professional League. She is among that organization's youngest members, and also belongs to three art associations in Boston and Cambridge.

Looking back, Winestein can pinpoint where her compulsion to create art began. She lived until she was eight in St. Petersburg, Russia, in an apartment filled with books and art her parents had collected. Museums were a favorite choice for family outings.

"I did my first drawing when I was four," Winestein says. "I drew my favorite teddy bear. I always had this very classic, draw-from-life instinct." She started her formal art instruction at age five. When she was 12, a few years after the family immigrated to Boston, she enrolled in Saturday classes at the Museum of Fine Arts. Eager to work with the human form but too young to attend life drawing studios, she copied nudes and portraits from the great masters, a type of exercise she still finds enlightening as she develops her skills.

Artists may be born and not made, but it was at the BU Academy that Winestein gained the confidence to identify herself as one. With the headmaster's encouragement, she took an undergraduate drawing course for nonmajors at the School for the Arts when she was in 10th grade, and two years later, as a high school senior, she simultaneously enrolled in SFA's freshman visual arts program.

"I had been doing art all my life as a hobby," she says, "but it was because of the academy that I started taking it seriously. The instruction and the opportunities I've been provided with at BU have allowed me to progress by leaps and bounds."

SFA's traditional style of training appeals to Winestein. Although she appreciates some abstract art, an apple on her canvas is clearly an apple.

"Portraiture is probably the most interesting to me, but still life is still a very useful subject, especially for developing artists," she says. "Most still life is a surface observation: it comes down to aesthetic pleasure from combinations of color and form, which present very interesting technical questions."

The Delft Vase (pastel on paper, 2001) was recently shown in a juried exhibition at the Copley Society of Boston. Two other pastels by Winestein are on view through March 31 in the annual Women's History Month exhibition at City Hall.

Landscapes are also part of her professional portfolio, and Winestein brings along art materials on every vacation. Two landscapes from her travels include a view of a vineyard in Canada she saw while attending a George Bernard Shaw festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and another scene from a more recent trip to Lake Champlain. She relies very little on photographs, she explains, because they tend to flatten the subject matter more than paintings or drawings do, "and when someone works a lot from photos, this flatness tends to come through." If she needs to complete a piece in the studio that she started outdoors, she will take notes and paint from memory or sketches.

Aside from her art, Winestein, a Trustee Scholar, has also excelled in academics. She taught herself Latin the summer after ninth grade and took a translation course in her sophomore year. As a senior, after skipping a year of math, she took multivariable calculus, an honors seminar on Thomas à Becket, and a University Professors introduction to literature course. This is not unheard of at the academy, which allows students to enroll in a variety of college classes. Winestein says her studies of the humanities while in high school have prepared her well for courses such as art history, which she took last semester.

"I was able to get more out of the course because I could effectively comprehend the readings we were assigned," she says. "Sometimes it seemed almost as if these people weren't writing in English, but at least I had a certain intellectual place from which to work."

Winestein, who matriculated at BU as a sophomore this past fall and is double majoring in economics and visual arts, once considered pursuing an advanced degree in international finance. Now she's leaning toward the idea of a master's in arts management, fine arts, or art history, or perhaps a pair of degrees in these areas. "Amazing geeks" is the term she uses to describe herself and her friends when asked if she has much time for socializing. While she loves ballroom dancing and attends semiformals, most weekends she can be found painting in a basement studio in her family's Brookline home.

Her father helps promote her art, searching for shows that are not too avant-garde. She might one day feel driven to work in the abstract, but not now. There is still much to learn as a classicist.

"Salvador Dali said that before you break the rules, you have to know them," she says. "I probably don't intend to break the rules too much, but I also want to develop an original style. I don't want to just emulate others all my creative life; I want to progress.

"But I think I'll stay, relatively speaking, traditional."

Winestein's work can be viewed at www.annawstudio.cjb.net.

23 March 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations