Artistry in
Motion

“One thing leads to another.” This is the way I make art. I work in my studio with a few projects going on at once. My life is abundant with the sounds, colors and curiosity from my childhood, to the coming of age of and the flow of ideas and paradoxes, fixed values becoming fluid, and paths of bewilderment to wonder. As Whitman wrote in his Song of Myself, “I contain multitudes.” Each shows up in my writing and art, collages of color and space and there is a rhythm there. My artist friend wrote in big black letters on her studio door, “Art, like life, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

“This is not that”

Layers

Nancy's richly layered works are defined by color, pattern, and intuitive form. Her practice spans abstract painting and sculptural assemblage, offering a visuals rooted in past experiences, and daily living.

Texture

I allow myself to wander as I work, following visual cues and objects that spark curiosity. This openness is essential to my process; it gives the work its sense of movement and spontaneity

Color

Bold color is my language. It carries emotion, movement, and rhythm before form ever speaks. Color drives my process allowing me to build layered surfaces that feel alive and intuitive.

The Heart of Creation

My publisher has forced me to write an artist statement. I tell her that art is its own statement, but she has won, so here I go.

I do not paint representative art because I have a camera for that. It’s been said that my gift is in the blending of colors. Some of my paintings are loud and shouting for attention. A Barbie pink can sit between a green that bites your eyes and the palest blue that is dawn or dusk. All three have tried out for the choir. I mix and until they are harmonic. It’s harder than you think and that’s where my years of training enter the picture. My degrees are in art and music education, and I have taught 5 year olds who draw tulips with their chunky crayons for Mother’s Day cards, workshops with troubled teenagers, book club ladies who meet after 5 o’clock in my studio sipping wine to loosen their grips on the brushes. They come in joking about their fears of judgement and leave, pleased like 5 year olds. I have written books and taught workshops about the art of noticing ordinary things: the seasons’ colors, the shape of a branch, the miracle of birch bark thin as parchment. We paint the branches and weave them into sculptures like ____, or collect odds and ends from a construction site and fashion them together like Louise Nevelsons works that hang in museums around the world. I sold my fist painting in Las Vegas to Tommy Smothers. Most of my early works were large canvases that hung in the hallways and offices of commercial buildings, or auctioned of at fundraisers for cures. I sold two large pieces to the governor of Nevada. My studio is built on the banks of the Bigwood River in Idaho. If you’ve ever tried to paint “the moment of water,” you’d better have a month or two of time and a whole palette of thick paint. Not just blue and green, but little dots and curves of all the others. To find the flow, it helps to read the last lines of Norman MacClean’s A River Runs Through It. I never learned to fly fish, but I tubed down the river in Provo Canyon summer after summer and slept in the loft of our cabin listening to the creek that flows down from what is now Sundance on mount Timpanogas. That magic is the source and goal of my artwork.

Most of my paintings have a story before I begin.

I have lots of poets in my life, and I answer their words with my paintings. A poem has rhythm, too, which I paint in straight lines or smudged boxes or flows of circles upon circles. You’ll see this in my work. What you behold is what your eyes bring to you. That’s the point. I read Neruda’s Ode to Common Things and painted large wooden scissors, or yardsticks, each stroke a subtle measured color that you have to stand up close to notice. I fixed them together in 36 inch wooden squares. The edges are uneven because life is that way and seldom perfect. In a class on batik, I dyed a white velvet fabric into a dappled purple and wrote thick gold cursive letters from a line of a sonnet. At thrift stores I find some almost-good paintings and I refashion them, turning tradition shapes of vases and fruits and flowers into something Picasso might place in his portraits with all the eyes in the wrong places. He said “all art is copied,” and I take him at his word.

Quilting was part of the culture of my world...

Quilting was part of the culture of my world, and you’ll see that in my work. The source of one of my favorites is the antique quilt given to me by my artist eraoerdinaire, Roger Thomas.It is a construction of sturdy wools of the fashionable suits from the 30s and 40s that my grandfather wore to his law office on Main Street. It is obvious that the women who stitched it were artists themselves, the colors so subtle and sublime. They seemed slightly weathered, and my painting is a brighter reflection of that exquisite quilt. I do not have to paint for a living, but I do think that I paint to live. Like food and water and air, I am nourished with all forms of music and all frequencies of color. My music and my art have been the scaffolding that held me up when life was dark and I could hardly move. I have counted on them when I’ve been abandoned by truths that became lies, children who are ill, and even the sudden death of my healthy, newly married son. Some things, like nature, you can count on. They say, “I know, I know,” and sit with you until you can breathe again. I do not paint those times. There is enough darkness in life to go around the globe, and I have no desire to paint it. I paint the vibrant, abundant life in living color. My paintings are not answers or instructions. They are invitations. What they mean is yours alone to discover, and I hope they find a place where they can truly belong .