Artist Statement
Nance Miller, Sausalito, California
I am a Bay Area painter working primarily in oils. I move the pigments across the canvas with my hands, no brushes, focusing on light and building atmosphere layer by layer. Currently I am exploring tonalism, light, atmosphere, and the passage of time. Time passes and much changes, yet there is a quality that remains and holds history. I am exploring that ephemeral essence, the light that comes through all living things, that feeling one gets when you look out and discover, "Ah, I am at peace here". By decreasing or even eliminating many recognizable forms, I seek to take a landscape down to its barest bones and let the viewer's emotions, memories and personal history fill in the scene.
My influences are Rothko, Turner, and the Hudson River School of painters. While these may seem like odd bedfellows, they all inform my work equally. It is the power of emotion these artists can evoke in the simplest of forms. The Hudson River School painters understood place, in its most ephemeral and atmospheric sense. With inspiration from Rothko, I seek a separation of space and color as the backdrop, loving the sometimes gentle, sometimes not so gentle vibration that comes from shifting hues and values within a color space, putting colors in conversation with each other. From Turner I strive to emulate his strong sense of movement and emotion. And then there is the horizon line - the place where land/water meets sky, where earth meets the heavens. As a dear friend of mine said, “It is the place where the world quivers”.
“It is not what you see that matters, it is what you feel.” -Henry David Thoreau
Sense of Place. It enter’s through your eyes, travels through your veins and into your soul. And, takes you away. Light, water, air creating a place to sense peace and calm. Take a moment fly through the clouds and breath.
