Since Walls Fine Art Gallery’s beginnings in 1984, owners David Leadman and Nancy Marshall have spent the years passionately involved with fine art.
Nestled in the trees at what is geographically the center of Wilmington, NC, the gallery houses truly remarkable work by local, national, and international artists as well as the conservation framing design studio and the art conservation lab, run by Natalie Marshall. Art in the Southeastern US has historically been all but confined to the formal portrait, but following the advent of air conditioning, lawn mowers, and bug spray, people from outside the South have disembarked on the white sand beaches bringing with them their cultural habit.
Although one must still be born in Wilmington to be from Wilmington, cultural influx accompanying these new residents has been embraced, allowing all the arts in Wilmington to set higher standards. That change in standards has tapped a network that David and Nancy have been developing over a combined 60 years, bringing in Russian exhibitions, Picasso shows and the Oil Painters of America 2010 exhibition, as well as painting workshops and art lectures.
Walls’ owners teach Art 101, one on one, at the drop of a hat – often several times a day. The success of those lessons is measured not just in purchases but in the wide eyes and oh-now-I-get-its that are the first steps to acquiring an art passion of one’s own.
David and Nancy are painters themselves with a shared admiration of printmaking, gilding, and restoration. They work with clients to develop private and corporate art collections, and to appropriately present and care for the work, with appointments in the gallery and, more often, in clients’ homes.