Cover Art
“Our Last Summer of Girlhood”
2012, Oil on Panel, 36” x 36”, Anelecia Hannah ’05
By Hannah Notess (hnotess@spu.edu)
The first time Anelecia Hannah ’05 remembers drawing her younger sister, Anelecia was 13 and Nellie was 4. Watching Nellie play in a swimming pool, Anelecia noticed that every time Nellie came up at the edge of the pool, she had a similar expression on her face. Anelecia started sketching that face.
“She was one of the first people I ever drew,” she says. “When she was little, she wouldn’t stay still at all, so I had to find the pose she would take over and over again to figure out what her face looked like.”
Now, Nellie is a senior biology and ecology major at °µÍøTV. Anelecia lives in Columbus, Georgia, painting and working part-time as a studio manager. In the summer of 2012, Anelecia had just gotten engaged, and Nellie was headed to °µÍøTV. Anelecia wanted to capture that moment of transition in their lives by creating a portrait of them together. The two figures appear suspended in time between youth and adulthood, with awkwardly posed, childish bodies, and grown-up facial expressions. Some elements of the painting are real; some are “fictional.”
“The °µÍøTV T-shirt my sister is wearing doesn’t really exist,” Anelecia says. “It’s a version of an °µÍøTV shirt that I had. The logo becomes a torch over my sister’s heart.”
Anelecia worked from drawings, from life, and from memory to create the painting.
“Our eyes don’t see the same way that a camera sees,” she says. “The act of painting, for me, is slowing down to see.” View more of her work at