March Artist Spotlight
Meet Nan Daly
I have been primarily a watercolorist, painting landscapes and flowers. Originally from upstate New York, I grew up in an apple orchard, so nature and botanicals have always been favorite subjects. I’ve been a high school English teacher, an owner/designer of a greeting card company, a professional calligrapher, a college admissions counselor–and a member of WSA for over 20 years.
Art was always an interest, but it became a serious one after classes at the MFA and the DeCordova, week-long workshops with Karlyn Holman and Barbara Nechis, and hours spent with my several shelves worth of art instruction books. Karlyn showed me how to paint loose and tight in the same painting, and Barbara imparted her philosophy: “If you don’t have an idea in your head, you shouldn’t have a brush in your hand.”
Like most of us, I started out attempting realism, but I found my real joy was abstraction. A series of abstracted watercolor landscapes continued through many years, with frequent breaks for more realistic flower paintings. I felt busy. I had held offices and taken jobs in my associations—Wellesley, Needham, Dedham, Scituate—and a Signature Membership in the New England Watercolor Society. There were many show opportunities and I tried to exhibit in all of them. For twenty years I hosted an annual Open Studio in my home. Also for many years I have been making annual collaborative books with Kay Villa. She lives in Wisconsin now, so we mail the pages back and forth, each of us filling our side of the page. For our last three books I painted small watercolors.
Then there was Covid. I was still busy, but not with painting. Our family—daughter, son-in-law and grandson—were living with us, and that seven-year-old needed a teacher to get him through those long Zoom sessions for school. When the world opened up again, and our family moved across town, I regained my painting time but I found I wanted to step back from the “business” of art. I rarely exhibited, and I stopped doing Open Studios, though I did teach a weekend workshop in experimental watercolor right after Covid.
I started to wonder if this was some kind of Artist’s Block.
Instead of painting as much as I once did, I am trying totally new things. Filling a sketchbook with tiny pen and ink drawings. Filling another with abstract paper collages. Drawing animals in colored pencil over acrylic patterns. Adding watercolor to Gauguin’s trace monotype technique. Exploring mark making on collage papers. Creating small books filled with patterns. Few of these things are frame-worthy. I do them just for me.
Julia Cameron said that at some point we all need to “refill the well.” I’m holding onto that thought. I’ve realized that stepping back is not the same as walking away. Exploring a new media, a new size, a new substrate, a new technique, a new subject, a new series—no matter where we are headed in our art, it takes time to find the path.
Nan Daly lives in Needham with her incredibly supportive husband and a green-eyed cat named Titania.