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Hazel Halle Lentini - Oil Painter
Born at a time when most American homes had both parents in the same house, Hazel enjoyed her childhood in rural Pennsylvania with three younger sisters. Watching her father do sign-lettering at home, she gathered an innate love of fonts and a precise hand; her father Clifford A. Halle was a professional sign-painter from an early age. After she graduated high school she joined an art group that met in an old farmhouse; the painting lessons were taught by landscape painter Charlie Pitcher of Pittsburgh. Hazel became best friends with painter/teacher Tony Massaro who introduced her to a variety of art media. She took a course at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh of drawing from a live model. She exhibited and sold some oil paintings.
Moving to New York City in January 1966, she was introduced to painter/teacher David Leffel, known for his chiaroscuro still-life oil paintings; she considers his personal oil lessons as having a value too great to measure. She studied stained glass design and execution with Raphael Nemeth. In January 1970 she met Peter Lentini, by chance crossing the street near the New York public library. They held a kindred connection of practicing hatha yoga and they decided to move to Sacramento; while living at Youth for Truth, they married that December. Moving back to New York, Halle worked at Doubleday Publishing in the Junior Literary Guild and took illustration classes at the School of Visual Arts. In 1972 Peter and Halle moved to North Carolina, working at a printing job where she did pen and ink drawings that illustrated for Christian literature in newsprint. They settled in Hendersonville and had 4 children: Jennifer, Jeremiah, John and Justin. Halle, as a home-maker, made time to design and execute her designs in stained glass, both as lamps and flat pieces.
When husband Peter died, the challenges were great, both financially and emotionally, but her children were her strength. For 8+ years, she was ad designer for a local shopper newspaper, the Town Tooter and more recently designs for the LED billboard for WHKP radio. She enjoyed helping a local framer in the frame shop.
At the urge and coaching of her daughter Jennifer, Halle took up painting in oils again. Halle enjoys exploring still-life, floral and landscape subjects on the canvas. Many of her canvases are landscapes from the imagination that may evoke a memory of a similar place in the viewer’s experience. Her life experiences contribute to the subjects and style of painting she finds most absorbing.
“Each painting has its’ own dynamic, and whether the excitement is contained in color juxtaposition, or texture, or working out the composition, there is a new challenge every time I put paint to the canvas surface,” she observes.