Hello everyone, this an interview with my teacher and friend Anita Herron. I have been her student for the past 17 years, I began lessons in 2002. Anita has been teaching students since 1982, she teaches painting, drawing, pastels, and pencil drawing. Anita teaches students between the ages of 8 to 16, some have gone on to art school.
Anita liked to draw horses at a young age, she liked to draw them on the chalkboard during recess. Her parents couldn’t afford to send her to college so she worked at night as a senior in highschool painting flowers on lamps earning money for college. She went to Luzerne County Community College for a time after she had her children. Anita would enter her artwork in local fairs like the Luzerne County Fair and the Bloomsburg Fair, sometimes she would win ribbons and prizes. One time she got a phone call from a mother asking Anita to teach her daughter, and that is how she got started as a teacher. She started her art studio in 1992 after building an addition onto her house. At first, she would only have lessons on Saturday and the kids would paint in her kitchen. She gets students through word of mouth, she never advertised for business. She charges $10 per student, for an hour and a half; the student can paint whatever they like, all the materials are included. Anita likes to keep the amount she charges low so that the kids could come and enjoy the time.
The “The Old Seaman” is a painting that Anita really considers her first popular painting and the first painting she won a big ribbon on. It was a college project, she had to find an interesting face and build a scene around it. The project was a from a life drawing class she was taking at LCCC. She had her ex-husband pose for the figure of the painting and she used images of Maine for reference for the scenery to create a scene of an old man watching boats from a dock.
She has a certificate from the Washington School of Art in New York. She took a home correspondence course in her senior year of high school because she wanted to do more art. She worked for channel 28 as a court room painter, she would sketch people during trials. Anita has painted murals for Wilkes-Barre Academy. She did work for Penske Truck Leasing for a time painting the lettering on trucks. As Anita likes to say ” art can take you to a lot of places” and that is true about all of her experiences as an artist. When Anita isn’t teaching, she is working on her own paintings, she likes to paint animals and she is currently working on a painting of kittens.
