Nancy Tankersley
Nancy Tankersley is an artist and teacher who paints mostly in oil. Initially a portraitist, she now moves fluidly between figures, landscape and still life.
MessageIn 2016 and 2017 Nancy Tankersley was invited to exhibit at the prestigious Masters Exhibition at the Salmagundi Club in NYC. Recent honors include Best of Show at the Lighthouse Plein Air Festival 2017 and the Dickinson Award for Best Painting by a Signature Member of the American Impressionist Society 2016 Annual Juried Exhibit.
Founder and Director of the Easton Studio, a workshops facility begun in Easton in 2010, the artist mentors and teaches workshops and also sponsors workshops by nationally know painters.
Statement
My years as a portrait painter and studio painter and then as a plein air painter have given me the experience and skills to paint “things”. And often these things had narratives that I could use to evoke an emotion that I could share with the viewer. In recent years, however, I have returned more and more to the studio where I could explore the paints and surfaces and experiment with new painting techniques and tools. My 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)