Half a century ago Doreen Tunnell began taking courses at the Atlanta College of Art, intending to improve on the aptitude she showed for painting.
Fast-forward to the late 1980s. Mrs. Tunnell, by then 60 years old, decided to earn a degree at the ACA. She took a wide-ranging curriculum -- learning about welding, sculpture and print-making as well as painting -- and at age 65 was rewarded with a bachelor of fine arts in 1993.
The other media were passing acquaintances; Mrs. Tunnell continued to focus on transferring her thoughts and vision to canvas. Throughout the 1990s she shared a studio at the King Plow Arts Center with sculptor Donna Pickens. There Mrs. Tunnell painted, and she taught and encouraged aspiring artists, ranging from children to intermediate-level adults.
“The last couple of decades of Doreen’s life have been a time of fulfillment for her,” said Ms. Pickens, now an associate curator of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.
“First,” she said, “Doreen received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art, of which she was very proud. Then, the two of us spent five or six years together teaching and creating at our studio. Finally, she received the recognition of other artists during a recent retrospective show of 20 of her paintings at Georgia Perimeter College.”
Don Dougan of Marietta, a sculptor and curator of the college’s fine arts gallery at its Clarkston campus, said the show of Mrs. Tunnell’s work was well-attended by students and by fellow artists, and the comments he heard were uniformly favorable.
Doreen Tunnell, 83, of Atlanta died March 27 at Piedmont Hospital of heart failure. Her family plans a private graveside service for her Thursday, with arrangements by H.M. Patterson & Son, Spring Hill. A reception for her friends is scheduled from 3 to 5 p.m. that same day at the Members Room at McElreath Hall in the Atlanta History Center, 130 W. Paces Ferry Road N.W., Atlanta.
Spencer Tunnell of Atlanta described his mother’s paintings as abstract expressionism influenced by what Mrs. Tunnell called the path of her life and her feelings about spirituality.
He said his mother did numerous dark paintings based on a theme she took from the dark woods that poet Dante Alighieri mentioned at the beginning of his “Inferno.” However, her son said, her somber colors were interspersed with bright flashes of light, representing hope for a more luminous future.
In 1999, Mrs. Tunnell took a trip to Santa Fe, N.M. There, her son said, she was transfixed by the quality of the natural light. Her more recent paintings reflected that experience, suffused as they were with an ethereal brightness, he said.
Mrs. Tunnell’s father was with the Federal Aviation Administration, and during her childhood the family moved all over the West -- from Montana, where she was born, to Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Utah, Washington state and Wyoming.
She finished high school in California and came to Atlanta after her father was assigned here. Though he moved on, she chose to stay. She went to work for an insurance company, where she met her husband-to-be, Trenton Tunnell Jr.
Another of her sons, Trenton Tunnell III of Atlanta, said that while she grew up out West, “you would have thought she was born under a magnolia tree. She became thoroughly Southern, including her accent.”
She was also a fervent Georgia Bulldogs fan, and she and her husband had season tickets on the 50-yard line at Sanford Stadium for nearly four decades.
Besides her husband of 58 years, survivors include another son, Steven Tunnell of Palm Springs, Calif.; and a brother, the Rev. Steve Brown of Columbia, S.C.
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