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 in 1938, 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, surprising 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, Lionel Gilbert, and Robert Rabinowitz
in New York City.