Originally a cosmopolitan Northerner, Elaine Stone Wagner became an important member of the Spartanburg art community when she moved South in 1970. Born in 1931 in Warren, Pennsylvania, she was recognized as an artist from a very young age. At only three years old, her grandmother recalled the cartoons of Mickey Mouse the young Wagner had drawn in the church hymnals.
After attending the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Wagner went to the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia in the 1950s, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in fashion design with a minor in illustration. Wagner had been described by many as tall and attractive, so it followed that her foray into fashion illustration was through modeling. After a year as a high fashion model for Hattie Carnegie in New York City, she got a job as a copywriter and illustrator for the fashion brand Jonathan Logan. For seven years, this job would take her around the country to coordinate department store fashion shows.
She would marry William “Bill” Wagner in 1962 and move to Beaver Falls, NY, which had good snow for paintings, but not much work in fashion illustration. Then, a job offer at Hoechst Celanese for Bill meant another move to New Jersey. It was here that Wagner began taking art classes at the Pratt Institute and at the Art Students League in NYC with a private instructor. Expanding her subjects to cityscapes, she was selected for a juried art show. From this moment, she knew painting was something she would continue to pursue. Wagner’s 1962 honeymoon trip to Europe sparked a love of travel that continued for many years, but it also motivated her to paint more with watercolor and oils. Together, Bill and Elaine participated in “high adventure” to all seven continents, visiting Africa, France, China, Indonesia, Russia, Romania, Tibet, and Haiti, among other locations. She would return home with baskets of photographs of pig roasts and houseboats, and these photographs would be used to paint scenes in her studio. They also inspired scenes from her imagination and allowed her to embellish local commissions. For example, she used photos she took of Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny, France, to fill in the background of a portrait for a friend of hers.
A 1970 move to Spartanburg, South Carolina, would provide her with an opportunity to make studio art into a career. Soon after arriving, she joined the Spartanburg County Art Association and the Artist’s Guild and taught at the Arts Center. By 1977, she was an artist-in-residence at Wofford College, and immediately after her exhibition, she began teaching visual arts classes there. She participated in an array of local shows, exhibitions for the annual South Carolina Watercolor Society, and had a solo show at the University of South Carolina, Columbia in 1986. She also won an Award for Excellence for painting in the National League of American Pen Women’s State Show in 1993. Spartanburg buildings, like the old Andrews Building that used to be in downtown Spartanburg, and the Spartan Food Systems Tower—as well as people and pets—would join her travel paintings to become a large proportion of her subjects. Wagner’s retirement from Wofford College in 1997 did not mark the end of her artistic career. She remarked in 2005 “I would have to be awfully senile to stop doing [art].” Her commissions and gifts have ended up in the homes of countless friends and family in Spartanburg.