It’s not news that the Eastern Shore art scene tends toward representational painting. And at the center of our regional art scene lies Nancy Tankersley – a master of contemporary expressionism.
With a lot of new minimal and cerebral art these days, there’s not always much for viewers to enjoy. Nancy Tankersley gives us the pleasure of appreciating a traditional medium, one that any art appreciator knows and loves. Like the oil painting masters before her, Nancy’s ability to paint light is simple and beautiful. We’ve appreciated this for centuries, this layering of color, abstraction of shape. Tankersley gives us local imagery to view in this genre – from narratives of people at work, to landscapes and portraits.
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Perched on the backside of the second floor of the South St. Gallery in Easton, Nancy Tankersley’s tree-top studio is cozy, and filled with music. Up there, in a small room filled with light, she methodically knocks out work, piece by piece. Focused and serious, she loves painting and it shows.
Nancy Tankersley has been an artist all of her life, a painter. She went to college for fine art, but ended up in Santa Cruz, where no fine art program existed in the late 1960s. Embroiled as everyone was in the times, Nancy found herself in school for community development and social work, and spent her early career as an activist, bringing birth control to migrant workers and working with the Office of Economic Opportunity, the agency responsible for administering the War on Poverty programs of then President Johnson’s Great Society agenda.
As a young artist of the 1970s, she pushed herself to make art that mattered – showcasing the injustices in the world around her. But she came to realize that her best work always appeared when she painted what she knew – elements of her own life. With a husband in the military, she moved around. Florida offered fertile territory for her growing interest in portraits, and she focused on that – painting what she knew best at the time – children and families.
A move to Washington DC convinced Nancy to get serious in a new way, and she opened a studio outside of her home, treating her work as a full-time career. She learned early on that artists can’t depend on one market alone, and marketing her work to galleries around the country proved successful. Her paintings are now handled by a number of galleries from coast to coast.
Her style has always been representational. In recent years, she’s begun to think more abstractly, thinking about shapes and forms, rather than things. “Rendering something well is a learned skill. It takes talent, but you can learn to do it”, she says. “Anybody with decent skills can render well, and the general public is really impressed by that. But the best artists go beyond that. Great art gives you more – a sense of something, like a memory, or a quick glance. Taking reality, and giving it emotion, humanizing it. That,” she says – “is art.”
It’s a pleasure to observe her way of thinking on the canvas – through her strokes, laying color on top of color, Nancy executes her craft skillfully. She abstracts the planes of color and light with changing brush widths – when you view her images up close, the subject matter gets fuzzy and disappears. As you move back, the abstractions make sense again. Making optical jumps from pools of color to a narrative is a pleasant experience for any viewer, and it’s easy to see why Nancy Tankersley is known as one of our region’s best fine artists.
It’s impossible to talk about Nancy Tankersley without mentioning that she is the owner of one of Easton’s most successful art galleries, the South Street Gallery, or that she’s known as the Mother of the East Coast Plein Air movement. In addition, she’s co-owner and founder of the Easton Studio and School, a serious new art school that is attracting top talent from around the nation.
Indeed, if one were to calculate the economic impact that Nancy Tankersley has had on our region in terms of tourist dollars, from restaurants to hotel stays, the number would be gigantic.
Tankersley has spent much of the past 8 years of her life promoting other artists and building the Plein Air event. Now she’s decided that it’s time to re-focus her energy on her own work.
After eight years in Talbot County (yes, only 8), Nancy Tankersley has developed a true love for Easton and Talbot County. Her appreciation for Talbot’s people can be seen in her portraits of people at work. From workers in the restaurant trade, to men mowing lawns, she paints people at work with a serious, quiet dignity. Recently commissioned to do a series on watermen, Nancy appreciates the chance to get to know these men, and paints them with honesty and respect.
For more information about Nancy Tankersley’s work, visit the South St. Gallery, at 5 South St. in Easton, or see her website here.
kathi says
Nice job!!!
Gail says
This is a fantastic article about Nancy Tankersley. Nancy is a classy lady as well as an extraordinarily talented painter. She truly believes that a “rising tide floats all boats” and this is one of the reasons that she encourages and supports the arrival of quality art galleries and art events in the Easton and mid-Shore area. She intuitively knows that the more good art exists in the area, the greater the number of people will be who will make Easton an art destination town, and the greater will be the economic benefit not only to the galleries, but to the restaurants, shops, B & Bs and hotels. I hope everyone reading this article will make their way to the South Street Art Gallery in Easton, and enjoy the high quality of paintings to be seen there.