Born into a military family and living first in Germany and then Italy, Marsha Hammel says it was always a thrill to get the Sunday comics in newspapers from the States. “As a little kid, five or six years old, I would try to copy the pictures and the writing,” she recalls.

Though her parents were not art aficionados, her father had a deep appreciation for music. Her parents hired an Italian music instructor to teach her to read music. “Alas, I had no talent for it. The following year, I was given ballet lessons. The teacher had great hopes for me ... but once again, I proved to be devoid of the devotion required to be a dancer.” Art, however, was another story entirely. “I drew on everything everywhere,” she says.

Once back in the States, Marsha was given art lessons by a woman who impressed upon her the importance of taking care of her brushes by using Ivory soap and warm water to clean the brushes then to form them into shape to let them dry. “To this day, I do that. And I still have, enshrined in decorative vases, every brush I’ve ever used—worn to a nub, but clean.”

When she was 13, Marsha went to live with her aunt in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. It was there her creative abilities got an important boost when her 11th grade art teacher recommended her for the Governor’s School where she received instruction from a sculptor from Columbia University. The lessons learned that summer, she says, became the foundation of her approach to drawing and painting. Even then, her favorite subjects were musicians and dancers.

She went on to study painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University, but found herself struggling with “conceptual art” and “abstract art.” Eventually, she returned to figurative painting. “I found my ‘voice’ drawing and painting in my own style of modernism.”

She admits to living a bit of the Gypsy life, traveling from New England to the Rockies, before settling in New Orleans for a few years.“It was there I began painting jazz musicians, those who were not famous but who devoted their lives to their art with little expectation of financial reward. My boyfriend then was a musician and I lived with him and his four bandmates in a flat in the Garden District. It was 1978. They had a gig at the 504 Club in the Quarter and we would troop down there on the trolley laden with guitars, amps, top hats and cymbals, and with sketchbooks and soft leaded pencils stuffed into my bag. Until the wee hours, I would draw the musicians on the stage and on the streets.”

She moved next to Florida in the early 1980s where her paintings really started to take off. “By the end of the decade, I’d had my first public exhibition in Tampa and sold half the show in the first weekend. All along, I had supported myself as a waitress or working in art shops, but now I had a stash of cash and I opened a gallery in Sarasota with it.”

Wanderlust, however, pulled her back to New England one more time. “But I did not like the icy white winters. Besides,” she adds, “they don’t know what grits or sweet tea are. I missed the South.”

Marsha returned to North Carolina in 2000 and built a spacious studio in Hendersonville. “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.” She says with a well-earned sense of satisfaction, “If only the instructors at VCU who told me I should learn to type because I had no talent could see me now.”

For more about the artist, visit her website at mhammelstudio.com. BlackBird Frame & Art (blackbirdframe.com) is located at 365 Merrimon Avenue.