HANOVER — Every time she sees the print of a fall-foliage landscape over her fireplace, Kathy Landgraf remembers visiting artist Robin Nuse to pick out paintings for donation to the auction benefiting the Montshire Museum of Science.
“She was very generous,” Landgraf, an Orford resident who served on the museum’s auction acquisitions committee in the late 1990s, said last week. “When I would call to say that the auction was coming up, and if she wanted to donate, she never balked at all. It was, ‘Sure! Come by, and I’ll have it ready for you.’ I’d get to her house and there’d be a stack of them leaning against a wall, and she was deciding at the last minute which ones to give to us.
“She had an extraordinary talent, but she was an ordinary person. She didn’t have any airs about her at all.”
Before Nuse died on May 3, her donations of art work raised more than $5,500 for the museum between the mid-1990s and 2017. And that was just the tip of the iceberg of her generosity during nearly 30 years in the Upper Valley, with her time as well as her artwork.
In 2011, Hanover’s 250th anniversary year, a pig sculpture that Nuse decorated for the Hanover Recreation Department’s Pig-and-Wolf contest auction raised $22,000 toward a playground at Thompson Terrace.
And as recently as March 3, Nuse captained the Rocking Rackets squad that raised $6,135 in pledges — $2,800 of it from Nuse herself — for the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, during the fifth annual Team Tennis to Smash Cancer tournament at Dartmouth College’s Boss Tennis Center.
“She also donated a lovely piece of her artwork to our auction,” Etna resident Janet Siegfried Simmons wrote on Nuse’s artist page on Facebook.
That painting was one of many in which Nuse, who lived on Sargent Street in Hanover, depicted people, mostly in silhouette, skating on Occom Pond, near the Hanover Country Club.
“If I had to pick a favorite of hers,” former Long Wind gallery owner Dave Celone said last week, “there’s one I really like in which her use of light, use of color, really captured the essence of that space.”
Nuse, who had moved to the Upper Valley with her husband, Arthur Gardiner, from northern Vermont in the early 1990s, first found inspiration in that space while their son Anders Gardiner skated on the pond as a youngster. And between Anders’ athletic endeavors — she helped revive Hanover’s Little League program during his pre-teens, and he went on to play at Macalester College — she made time to stay fit as well as to paint.
“She played a lot of tennis,” Lebanon resident and personal trainer Amy Fortier recalled last week. “She wanted to make sure she kept up with the motions — upper-body strength, quick feet, core strength. Keeping everything pain-free and moving. Very consistent. Whatever she’s doing, she’s very consistent about it.”
Not long into their weekly training sessions, Fortier learned about Nuse’s devotion to art, and began picking her brain.
“I was an amateur with a lot of stuff at my house, and so art was something we could talk about to take our minds off the rigors of the training,” Fortier said. “She talked me into applying for the Pig-and-Wolf sculpture contest. As it went along, we kept each other apprised of each other’s progress, and she gave me ideas on the kinds of products I should use that would make it work on that kind of surface. Suddenly, I realized I had a way to express myself.”
As she developed her own part-time art career, Fortier also realized she had a mentor in Nuse, who had followed in the footsteps of her grandfather, Pennsylvania impressionist Roy Nuse, by training at the Rhode island School of Design and working in art therapy as a young adult.
“We talked all the time about life, about her becoming an artist,” Fortier said. “She showed me that you could do it incrementally, not just stop everything and become an artist full-time, but do it for the love of art.”
Kathy Landgraf felt the emotion in each painting that Nuse donated to the Montshire auction, and quickly “fell in love” with a print of a scene in Stowe, Vt.
“It has beautiful fall colors and birch trees in the background,” Landgraf said. “I have the one print. I’d love to have a collection of her work.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.