Marsha Hammel
a Brief Autobiography

Music, particularly popular jazz music, has always been a part of my life. While I was growing up in Europe my parents played the latest Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Dean Martin, Louis Prima and Keely Smith on the Hi Fi; all the latest cool grooves from the States.

Miami, Florida, where I was born and spent intervals between my father's Air Force assignments, infused a love of Afro Cuban and Caribbean Music and left impressed upon my mind's eye the colors and forms of the subtropics.

As a teenager I lived with my Aunt, Uncle and three cousins in the small eastern North Carolina town of Rocky Mount. How dull, you might think, for a girl from Miami who had lived in Europe for years...Not dull at all. During the sixties, under the administration of then Governor Terry Sandford , North Carolina's public school children enjoyed the benefits of his far sighted educational vision. An arts scholarship to the 1967 Governor's School for Gifted Children ( it is now known simply as the Governor's School ) introduced me to figurative oil painting . Even then my favorite subjects were musicians and dancers.

Between 1968 and 1972 I studied painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. During this period I struggled with Conceptual and Abstract Art . Upon leaving school I returned to figurative painting and found my "voice" drawing and painting in my own style of Modernism.

After a bit of the gypsy life, traveling from New England to the Rockies, I settled down in New Orleans for a few years. It was there I began painting the jazz musicians, those who were not famous but who devoted their lives to their art with little expectation of financial reward. "Saxman", a 5ftx7ft oil painting, was the first of this monument to musicians. In 1993 "Saxman" was the first of a suite of Jazz Music images published by Felix Rosenstiel's , London, and is still the best selling print of the series.

Back in Florida, a decade later, first in Sarasota and then Miami, dancers returned to my canvases with drawings and paintings of the ballet, Flamenco and the young swing dancers who were reviving the Lindy at a local club.

Returning to North Carolina in 2000, building a spacious studio in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I have new inspiration in nature. Yet, the figures with musical instruments and dancers moving to the music continue to be an important part of my artistry.

Travels to Europe, particularly, London where my dealer-publisher is located, the subtropics and Central America bring new images and ideas to my easel.

For more than thirty years I have been a working artist;, over a thousand individuals and companies have collected my work. I continue to explore and grow within the form of Modernist painting, each new composition a challenge.