Making Time for Making Art
By Pat Kerns
The Alliance Art Gallery located at 121 N Main in downtown Hannibal is featuring two young
hard workers who must make time from their 9 to 5 jobs to create their amazing art.
Nevin McNally, this month’s guest artist, spends his days in his office as the Freight Sales
Representative for the transportation side of DOT foods, making sure those trucks we see in
every part of our country not only distribute food items but carry other freight for other
companies on their return journeys. In his free time, he creates art, usually developing his
surrealistic realistic oil paintings from initial doodles.
In kindergarten, his classmates praised his dinosaur drawings, inspiring him to become an artist.
Those dinosaurs continue to show up in his work. He contributes his style to his admiration of
two artists, the 16 th century highly realistic Caravaggio and 20 th century surrealist Salvadore Dali.
His process most often starts with him doodling in his sketchbook and with him finding subject
within those lines.
This very busy young man somehow also finds time to teach a variety of classes at the Quincy
Art Center. A Quincy native who graduated from Notre Dame High School, he attended classes
at John Wood Community College and then graduated from Culver Stockton College in Canton,
MO with a degree in art. His very colorful, often whimsical pieces jump off the walls of the
gallery.
Hannibal jeweler Brandy Hurt is the gallery’s Spotlight Artist. Brandi works full time for the
Hannibal Street Department, spending her days mowing grass and filling potholes and whatever
other jobs required. It is hard to imagine this woman on large mowers or shoveling asphalt then
switching to the delicate work of making silver and resin jewelry.
Brandy is the daughter of a jeweler and spent her childhood surrounded with the language of
jewelry making. She attended a variety of elementary and high schools mostly in the Memphis
Tennessee area when her family moved to wherever her father was employed. It was in her
senior year they moved to New Bloomfield MO. It was shortly after her graduation that her
parents made the decision to work for themselves and started AVA Goldworks in Hannibal. Her
father worked primarily with gold, but Brandi made the decision to work in silver and in resin.
To create her resin earrings she creates her design, carves a model, makes a mold from that
carving, filling that mold with resin and putting in sterling silver earring findings. Brandy is
known for her silver jewelry with a variety of stones and jewels and her signature silver wire
swirls.
She concentrates on making much of her pieces in January through March when she has more
time to do so. During Art Fair “season” she travels to various shows with her jewelry. That
schedule can be found on the AVA Goldworks Facebook and Instagram pages.
You can meet both of these young artists at the Second Saturday Art Walk on October 11 from
4:00 to 7:00 and hear them talk about their work during their artist talk at 6:00.