About the exhibit
“Sketching Life” is a show celebrating healing and the reemergence of creative energy. Drawn through the roots, it is collection of images that developed during Nancy’s daily drawing practice over the winter and spring of 2021.
This body of work was born in response to lock down and separation. The individual mixed media pieces are primarily in pastel, allowing mutability, spontaneity and a rich range of values. Nancy’s work conveys a sense of movement. She particularly enjoyed working on neutral grounds, where she felt the pigments themselves function as light.
Nancy’s exhibit may be viewed as a simple blend of figural, symbolic and landscape elements.
The taoist returns home to nature,
to the so-of-itself,
and thereby keeps heart-and-mind
safe from harm.
Brambles are transformed
into healing herbs.
The poor harvest
becomes an abundance.
– Magister Liu
Biography
Thanks to the MV Playhouse for hosting my first one-woman art show! I’ve lived on the Vineyard since 1984 and am thought of mostly as a string teacher, fiddler and songwriter. Newly retired from a school job into a pandemic, I became depressed. I cast around for a project and decided on drawing & painting. I publicly resolved to post a sketch a day on Facebook, whether it was any good or not. I had put art on the back burner mostly during my career in the schools. Now, 85 sketches later, local friends and well-wishers have started to realize that as an artist, I am not a beginner.
I have always loved making art. Kept after school for lousy handwriting, unable to draw a straight line, I didn’t think I was much good as an artist. Yet classroom note taking was always hidden under compulsive doodles. At home, we were all serious classical musicians. In the Iowa City of the ’50’s my three sisters and I competed on instruments. Nor did our dates find it easy to join dinner table conversation, where the “language of music” was pumping steroids. I was musically a natural but not a fan of discipline. The least focused of the family, after high school I knew a classical music career was not for me and quit. 10 years later I was introduced to fiddling and other musical styles.
A Liberal Arts student at the Evergreen State College with an emphasis on drawing & photography, my friends and I rented a gallery space to show our work. I joined a life-changing Art History Course, camping all over Europe. I stayed 2 years in London completing an Evergreen accredited “Self-Directed Learning Project” with life drawing, oil painting & etching courses at the Camden Arts Centre & City Lit, and countless hours spent in museums. I wrote about Pre-Raphaelite & Expressionist Art. My earlier art classes in the USA had favored quick gesture-drawing. Instruction in London was exactly opposite; a single drawing, a single model/pose, for 8 1/2 day sessions. This brought about a new relationship between hand and eye.
I returned to the States, and in time a house-mate offered me the opportunity to care-take her family property in Chilmark. The only violin teacher on the Vineyard retired shortly after I arrived here. I was considered the only candidate to fill her shoes, as Chilmark Chamber Music Society lobbied for the return of string instruction to the public schools. I studied Suzuki Teacher Training with Carol Sykes at the New England Conservatory. Then I got a Masters Degree in Education from Lesley College which included watercolor with Judith Campbell, ceramics, sculpture at Umass and student teaching under Janice Frame. Featherstone for the Arts has displayed my work sculptural work and one of my hand-built ceramic pieces is on permanent display there.
