ABINGTON – Dianne Panarelli Miller’s portfolio is filled with paintings of waterfalls and country fields, scenes of Newbury Street in Boston and granite quarries in Quincy, with names like “Frozen River” and “Sunday Ski.“ As of Saturday, add to the collection, “Trucchi’s Supermarket.”

“It’s what I do every day,” Miller said, speaking of her oil painting on location Saturday at the Abington grocery store. “Today I just happen to be at a supermarket.” Store manager Kenneth Coyle suggested that Miller, a frequent customer and Abington resident, set up an easel and paint the deli, giving customers a way to pass the time while they waited for their meat and cheese to be cut.

“It’s a lot cheaper than giving them beer and wine,” Coyle joked. For Miller, the three-hour session was an opportunity to educate people about local art. “People don’t know about artists in this area,” she said. “It’s an excellent educational effort.”

Miller is an award-winning fine artist, a “Copley Master” at the Copley Society in Boston, who is well known as a South Shore painter and who has worked in Bermuda, Italy and France. She is also a signature member of the New England Plein Air Painters, a group focusing on outdoor settings and live work, rather than art created from photographs. Miller utilized a technique Saturday known as alla prima, in which wet paint is layered on wet paint, requiring the artist to work quickly and finish a painting in a single sitting.

To create a single deli scene over the course of three hours, Miller said she starts with a basic template for the people in the painting and then takes “a little bit of this, and a little bit of that.” “I’m trying to be exact, but impressionistic,” she said. “You don’t want it to be perfect. You want the viewer to do some work.” The unofficial partnership with Trucchi’s may grow into more paintings of different parts of the store, or even paintings of other Abington businesses, Miller said. As for the original oil of the supermarket deli? As for the original oil of the supermarket deli?

Brockton, MA - Brockton, MA “Everything’s for sale,” Miller said.

Abington artist paints local supermarket scene - News - The Enterprise, 

By Staff Reporter Posted May 24, 2014 at 9:18 PM Updated May 24, 2014 at 9:28 PM