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Improvisations On Site: Pastels - Nancy Balliett
01 / 25 / 2009
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Nancy Balliett is a very modern landscape painter (Long Island, Cape Cod, Florida, Lake Como, Venice) who passes into her subject, finds its spirit, and translates it into colors and shapes and rhythms that become a surprising alterscape. You know you are seeing a tree or a moon, but it is a wholly original tree, a wholly original moon. Her pictures challenge, then surround you.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Nancy Balliett has been painting for almost thirty years and has appeared in countless group and one-person shows. Her pictures are in many collections, private and public. She works in plein air in both pastels and oils, but concentrates on pastels, relishing their subtlety and plasticity and calmness.
This unsigned shout of acclaim appeared recently in The New Yorker: “Bonnard-like breakfast tables in bright yellows and plum purples, stands of leafy blue-and-ochre trees, and cathedral-dominated skylines smacked with patches of lipstick red – Balliett’s evocations of Nantucket and Venice, in oil paintings and pastel drawings, are coloristically agitated but atmospherically peaceful.”
Nancy Balliett studied with Rose Albers at Dwight-Englewood and Richard Guggenheimer at Briarcliff College, as well as George Nama, and Robert Rabinowitz, and the late Lionel Gilbert in New York City.
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