Apex
Oil on gessoed muslin panel
24 x 24 in
$4500
Available at South Street Art Gallery Easton, MD
In this painting, artist Nancy Tankersley was intrigued by the geometry of the western landscape and used it as an underlying framework for the image. Having spent much of her life living on the east coast, she still feels a strong pull from the West where she finds inspiration for many of her landscape paintings. “Perhaps it is in my DNA as my father’s family had been ranchers and farmers in Colorado and Wyoming, but during the depression my father’s branch ended up in the Los Angeles area where my Dad graduated high school. He joined the Navy, was sent East and married my Baltimore born mother. My older brother ended up on the western slope of Colorado and two of my children live in Austin, Texas so I am frequently able to visit this inspiring landscape.”
Nancy has been active in the plein air movement in many roles. A founder of Plein Air Easton, a juried competition in Easton, Maryland, she has served as advisor and/or judge for numerous invitations and juried events, as well as actively participating as an artist in many others. As she enters her fifth decade as a professional artist, she finds herself returning more and more to the studio where she can explore the paints and surfaces and experiment with new painting techniques and tools. Her recent body of work is more about memory, imagination and emotion. As Thomas Cole the famous Hudson River landscape artist said, “If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in painting or poetry…In my studio, I have the luxury of time to draw a veil over the common details, the unessential parts which shall leave the great features, whether the beautiful or the sublime dominant in the mind.” (Thomas Cole to Asher B. Durand, 1838).
In addition to numerous awards in plein air events and national competitions, Nancy has twice been invited to exhibit in the American Masters Exhibit at the Salmagundi Club and this year will return to PACE (Plein Air Convention and Expo) as a field instructor. In 2018, she released a video titled Painting Figures from Photographs through Liliedahl. To see her current biography and awards, and to sign up for her mailing list, visit her website.
In March of this year the artist will have a solo show at South Street Art Gallery titled Journeys.
“Nancy Tankersley is one of America’s premier living artists. Her current work is but the latest chapter in an ongoing narrative about design, materials, technique, and meaning; and most recently, about memory, imagination and emotion. Through her painting, her teaching and mentoring of other artists, her consulting with arts and civic organizations, and her long journey as an artist she is influential in contemporary American painting. Any collection that purports to represent the late 20th and early 21st centuries in American art is incomplete without Nancy’s work. Nancy is a true American Master,” says Alan Brock, collector and owner of South Street Art Gallery, Easton, Maryland.
