Nancy Bass Works
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Boca Grande, FL
Nancy Bass’s paintings explore the fellowship between humans and animals through innovative approaches to the genres of landscape and portraiture. She is an artist who both lives with and thinks with nature. When she is not at her easel, Bass is photographing the skies and seabirds along the west coast of Florida, where she spends the winters, or tending to the garden at her home outside Asheville, in the mountains of North Carolina.
Bass was born in 1957 in Peoria, Illinois and studied art at Drake University in Iowa before moving to the east coast. For thirty-five years, she lived and worked on a farm in Albemarle County, Virginia where she raised a herd of cattle with her husband. There she began to develop two significant bodies of works: the first, a series of close-up portraits that recognize cows as individual, knowing subjects; and second, a series that transposes cows from their natural environment into the realms of abstract color fields. Bass’s more recent work, including her series At the Museum, builds on her interest in juxtaposing realism and abstraction and in transgressing the human/animal divide.
Education:
Studied at Drake University and the University of Virginia
Awards and Honors:
Art2Life International Competition (Juror’s Award), The Artist’s Magazine 2020 Competition (First Place – Animal Division), The Artist’s Magazine 2019 Competition (Second Place – Animal Division), The Richeson 75 Animals, Birds, and Wildlife Competition (Finalist), Semi-Finalist Bethesda Painting Awards (Semi-Finalist)
Selected Publications:
Streetlight Magazine, edited by Elizabeth Howard, The Best of the Breed: The Art of Nancy Bass”, September 28, 2018, The Artist’s Magazine, edited by Mckenzie Graham, “Pastorals Revisited, September 2016, vol. 33.7, Charlottesville Wine and Country Living, Edited by Jennifer Bryerton. Fall Edition “Farm to Easel: Artist Nancy Bass Shares Whimsical Portraits From her Farm,” p. 100, Moseman, Mark, “Agrarian Artist Bass Exhibits Abstract Art at Bone Creek,” The Prairie Fire Newspaper, August 2010, Studio Visit. Juried Publication. Edited by Steven T. Zevitas. vol. 9. Boston, MA: The Open Studios Press.
Selected Exhibitions:
Ensemble – Together Again, The Painting Center, New York, NY,
Artsy and Kunstmatrix, Art2Life International Competition online exhibition (Juror: Julie Nester),
Art Essex NYC Invitational, Westport, CT (Juror: Lisa Cooper),
A Tradition of Excellence: American Women artists at the RS Hanna Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX,
CAM Raleigh, Raleigh, NC,
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda Maryland, American Women Artists,
The Haggin Museum, Stockton, CA, Society of Animal Artists,
The Hiram Blauvelt Museum, Oradell, New Jersey,
150 Small Works Nebraska, The Bone Creek Museum, David City, NE
Selected Collections:
University of Virginia Children’s Hospital, Charlottesville, VA,
Emily Couric Cancer Center, Charlottesville, VA,
Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art, David City, NE,
Capital One Corporate Collection, Richmond, VA,
University of Virginia Hospital, Charlottesville, VA,
Martha Jefferson Hospital, Charlottesville, VA,
Augusta Health, Heart, and Vascular Center, Fishersville, VA,
Inova Cancer Center, Fishersville, VA
Representation:
Montgomery Lee Fine Art, Park City, UT,