ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

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WILLARD LUSTENADER

I was born in Rochester, New York in 1955.  I am a self-taught painter, having formally studied art history at Vassar College (B.A. 1979) and The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where I received my M.A. in 1981.  After a brief stint at the Wildenstein Gallery in New York, I moved to Connecticut to paint on a full time basis.

 A long friendship with the Philadelphia based painter Nelson Shanks served as a catalyst for my own approach to traditional realism during these early years.  In the late nineteen eighties and early nineties, an extended foray into abstraction and related conceptual trends served a need for formal exploration and afforded me a fresh approach to many issues in contemporary realist painting which I have relentlessly pursued for the past eight years.  My wife is classicist Diana Beste, Head of Foreign Languages at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford CT. 

08/03