Behind the Art: Portrait captures longtime Greensburg Art Center member

At 99, Nina Stahlberg leads a weekly drop-in painting class at Greensburg Art Center and also monitors the gallery.

The oldest and longest- tenured member of the center, Stahlberg also is the subject of an oil painting that hangs permanently in the center’s classroom.

The portrait was dashed off one evening in the early 1960s by noted Pittsburgh artist Mary Shaw Marohnic.

“She would come out from Pittsburgh and be here all day,” said Stahlberg, a Penn Township resident. “She was doing a demonstration of portrait painting one evening and asked if I would be her model, and I said yes.”

The painting took about two hours for Marohnic to complete.

Marohnic, who died in 1996 at age 90, was considered one of the most influential Pittsburgh artists and art teachers of her time. A member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, she was named Artist of the Year in 1963 by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

She earned a degree in painting and illustration from Carnegie Technical Institute (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1928 and, during the Depression, was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration to paint murals throughout the city, including at the East Liberty branch of the Carnegie Library.

An anecdote often told about Marohnic was that she played chauffeur for famed French painter Henri Matisse when he visited Pittsburgh for the 1930 Carnegie International.

For Stahlberg, who was new to making art when she sat for the portrait, Marohnic was a mentor and an inspiration.

“She would come up to your painting and it could be the worst thing in the world, and she would find something good in it,” Stahlberg said. “She’d say, ‘Look what you did here, this is excellent.’ And then she would tell you what was wrong with it.

“She was a wonderful teacher, and she taught me a life lesson,” she added. “She really encouraged me to be an artist.”

Stahlberg said she decided to get some formal training after making a drawing of her young son in the early 1960s.

“I thought, if I could get a likeness that easy, maybe I should take some classes,” she said. “I didn’t have any art background, but I was always interested.”

She has worked in oils, acrylics and pastels, with subjects including landscapes and seascapes.

One of her treasured memories is of doing portraits of children with cancer during annual Christmas parties sponsored by the Candlelighters Family Support Group.

Stahlberg connected with the group when her son Brian, who died in 1970, was in Children’s Hospital being treated for leukemia. Mother and son would pass the time sketching.

“At the last party, we had 10 artists who did 50 portraits in one afternoon,” she said. “It was our way of giving the families something priceless.”

Nowadays, Stahlberg is painting the dogs of family members and friends.

“Dogs are easy to do,” she said. “They never, ever complain that their nose is too long, and they never say, ‘Will you take that mole off of my face?’

“All of their personality is in their eyes, so when I’m painting a dog, I do the eyes first,” she said.

“Then I can talk to them.”