https://www.nancypaxmanthomas.com
Artist Statement
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. I mix 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 enter 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, or collect odds and ends from a construction site and fashion them together like Louise Nevelson’s works in museums around the world.
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.