
Acrylic, ink, Japanese paper on cradled birch panel (2023)
Size: w 12″ x h 12″ x d 1.5″
Acrylic, pastel, ink, Japanese paper on canvas (work in progress, 2022)
Size: w 30″ x h 15″ x d 1.5″
This painting began as a simple study of white clouds across a blue sky, with of course my two Nereid friends present leaping from one to the next. I decided it needed more colour, texture and complexity. The above detail is roughly 6″ x 4″, so I have a bit yet to do.
OKWA: Why Paint? at Art Noise Gallery is now open. It can be viewed in person (yay!) as well as virtually at https://shop.artnoise.ca/pages/in-the-gallery
Acrylic, ink, crayon, mesh netting on canvas (2021)
Size: w 16″ x h 10″ x d 1.75″
Why Paint? That is the question asked of members of the Organization of Kingston Women Artists. Those in the group who choose paint as their medium have responded and their work will be exhibited in a show at Art Noise Gallery, Kingston, Canada (https://www.artnoise.ca/gallery.html) from 24 June to 07 August 2021. My contributions to this show include this piece as well as Nereids in the Garden of Hippocampus (https://npaulartworks.com/2021/01/13/nereids-in-the-garden-of-hippocampus/).
Nereids Reach the Deep Sea Floor started with an impulse to play – with pigment, mediums, collage – with paint. Over time and iterations I came to understand at last where it was going and brought in the Nereids and their friends: the luminescent, fanged creatures of the dark mountainous world that is the bottom of the ocean. Monstrous in appearance to us, it is they who are under threat, endangered because of the commercial fishery practice of bottom trawling. (Present here: Dragonfish (x2), anomuran, coelacanth, hatchet fish, fangtooth (x2), anglerfish, viperfish (x2), predatory tunicate, frilled shark, gulper eel (x2), tube-eye.)
Acrylic and ink on canvas (2021)
Size: w 16″ x h 10″ x d 1.75″
Inspired by, and dedicated to, SJ by her AN.
Hippocampus: part of the brain associated with memory, thought to resemble a seahorse.
The starting point for this painting was an image of the hippocampus obtained by means of antibody staining by Thomas Deerinck and Mark Ellisman (2004), reproduced in Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. My sea dragon (barely discernible, certainly not recognizable, in any case upside down) inhabits an underwater garden of memory, dream and desire.
Size: w 9″ x h 12″ x w 1.6″
Inkjet and acrylic. Enhanced photo print hand finished, mounted on painted birch panel.
From an Ektachrome transparency double exposure (Toronto, 1975).
This piece is one of several (17) of mine now on exhibit as part of the annual Show of Smalls, Art Noise Kingston Ontario (https://www.artnoise.ca/store/c22/NANCY_PAUL.html) involving 25+ artists. I took this slide as a student at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD); this is the first time I have reproduced the image for show/sale.