About
Nancy Dean, a Signature Member of the Vermont Watercolor Society, is a watercolorist living and painting in Norwich Vermont. Her work continues to be largely representational, with occasional forays into abstractions of particular places or experiences.
In discussing watercolor painting, she likens it to sculpture, more than to other artistic mediums, because one starts with the light and "carves" one's images by going ever deeper by the application of darker values. Space and light are the two components most important to her, in her painting. She works to evoke a sense of space, large or small, which draws you in and encourages you to explore, to imagine what is behind or beyond or inside what is depicted, especially in her landscapes.
Her still lifes continue in that vein. They allow greater freedom, perhaps, in the choice of shapes and composition and color palette, even the mood. Her occasional portraits she considers an extension of landscape painting, with the difference being that there is internal light, as well as external, which shines through.
She has not been trained as a painter. Instead, she has gone the route of practice, with the study of books, others' art, workshops with famous and not-so-famous artists, many years of painting, in a group, with a teacher who taught one only to see what one was looking at but not technique. Now, she learns also through teaching other watercolorists, in her spacious studio.
She is happy to schedule a visit to her studio, or to discuss a payment plan for purchase of her paintings, as well as painting in general, or the setting up of a studio.
