AC_1965_Web

193 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K W O L L E N WOLLEN NALLA THEN AND NOW 4 B.A. New York University 4 Fairleigh Dickinson University 4 The Arts League 4 National Academy School of Fine Arts FAMI LY “My friends are family” ADDRESS 4 38 North Rd. Haskell, NJ 07420 CONTACT Nalla@optonline.net I L I V E I N a small New Jersey lake community of forty families an hour’s drive from New York City. Oddly, not far from where my ear- liest American relative arrived in 1638, not far from where my mother began teaching school in 1924 and where I was raised, and most oddly because I never imagined I would come back home. My first get-away-from-home dest inat ion was Ant ioch—be- cause girls wore pants. Then, my co-op experiences. First, at Denver Childrens’ Hospital and then an- other at Columbia Presbyterian in New York City as second surgical assistant (holding retractors in sur- gery). Early in my studies at Antioch I dreamed of becoming a doctor, but physics proved to be my undoing; I opted out of pre-med and into an art major.Those co-op opportunies in art were as extraordinary as the medical ones: work-scholarships at La Jolla Museum of Art and The Brooklyn Museum. I finished that curriculum with a senior project in stained glass, working under our nationally known department head, Bob Metcalf. When asked what I wanted for graduation, I said a plane ticket to Brazil. I landed in Rio de Janeiro and also landed my first non-Antioch job. I spent the next three years translat- ing and illustrating surgical papers for the world famous plastic sur- geon, Ivo Pitanguy. All of my Antioch experiences were coming together. In ’68, I trotted back to the states to keep growing my knowledge, ex- periences and passions. I took more art and science classes in pursuit of professional life as a medical illustra- tor.Along the way I fell in love with painting and moved to New York City where I could do it for a living. (HA! But thank you, Dad, for those next ten years of support!) Life was full of creative adventures. I teamed up with a renowned Guatemalan painter, Rodolfo Mishaan, to do il- lustrations and paintings for a film he was planning about Tecun Uman, Guatemala’s equivalent of Montezuma. In ’72, that gave me an exuberant seven-week exposure to Guatemalan culture in theV Cultural Festival there.Though the film never materialized, I continued painting and also began making collage con- structions. It was a medium my very artistic mother had worked in from time to time, and which I continue to explore. I managed to get in some other more indulgent travels, too, like a summer on the Greek isles.Art and travel, travel and art. I embraced it as the trajectory of my life—until 1981,when I received a call from the real world. My loving but paradoxical father (lumber yard owner/sometime poet) had died and left me part heir to his business, Center Lumber in Paterson, N.J. In simple terms, if I were to continue to eat, I would have to follow this opportunity. I knew nothing of busi- ness, much less this business. I ap- prenticed myself to the president of the company,who was now running the operation. Business meant keep- ing the books, selecting and purchas ing wood from sawmills, hiring and firing and supervising up to 40 em- ployees, running machinery, drying the wood and turning it into archi- tectural millwork “Shiva” (I love trying to create figures with spontaneous, rapid strokes). A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z