NANCY BEASLEY

Nancy Beasley is a painter inspired by the challenges, obstacles and transitions found in the natural world and personal experience. Her contemporary impressionistic landscapes capture an unequivocal adoration of the unique natural beauty of the Southwest. Her work offers bold, emotive visions of New Mexico, including images of pathways, rivers and mountain storms, often revisiting expansive night skies illuminated by haunting glints of light. Nancy's landscapes and other abstract works incorporate the mysteries of the natural world, the revelations of personal challenges and the transformations of the feminine.

With a background as multi-faceted and complex as the sources of her inspiration, Nancy holds a BA in Political Science from Texas A&M, and earned an MBA from St. Thomas University. Essentially self-taught, Nancy spent ten years in studio critique classes at the Glassell School of Art in Houston under Philip Renteria. Her personal and academic interests incorporate both art and science, including an enduring fascination with astronomy and physics, a renewed study of the 19th Century Impressionists, and an enthusiasm for traveling and hiking through the mountains and deserts of Texas and New Mexico.

Nancy's work has been shown in three juried exhibitions at the Houston Museum of Fine Art's Glassell School of Art. She continues to work in Taos and shows at the Wilder Nightingale Gallery. She also shows in Dallas at Art Ability/Gallery 163.

ARTIST STATEMENT
I believe that artistic expression is the most elegant means of confronting and making sense of transitions, obstacles and reinventions. My paintings are ways of articulating the emotions and explorations of those exquisite moments that can either define or confound one's human experience. Accordingly, my inspirations have been nature and its transformations, pregnancy and motherhood, illness and recovery, love and separation.

Each painting is created individually, as a remembrance and beatification of the vision, process or experience that inspired it. Many of my works, such as the Facing a Fork in the Road series and Passing Storm, offer content specific to the progress of a journey: roads, rivers, pathways and movement from one condition to another. My abstract impressionistic landscapes are expressive chronicles of the splendor and emotion captured in my photographs of the Southwestern United States. I use the content of these photographs to impart an emotive, intuitive palette. I want my colors to be as intriguing as the movement of a storm, or as bold as the emergence of a river at the base of a mountain. My photos and memories of nature are reinvented within the depths of imaginative retrospection.

In addition to my adoration of the rich natural beauty of the Southwest, I am also inspired by the feminine, represented in my landscapes as well as my continuing Women series. I hadn't painted in a year when I began the series, which represented a dramatic challenge in itself: frightening and invigorating. These paintings became perhaps my most symbolic works, exploring the gift of new life as an implacable mystery - something that is at once beautiful and joyful, yet bold and complex. My work presents my transition into motherhood as my own ultimate transition and my most glorious reinvention.

I feel that my paintings are inseparable from my personal experiences, yet these are the awesome experiences of transformation that enlighten and inspire us all. I sincerely hope that these moments I have captured will delight my audience; essentially providing the contentment and satisfaction that I experience at the completion of each work.