New York
April 2023
In the words of Georgia O’Keeffe “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way–things I had no words for.” Nicely represent Nancy Sandler Bass, a New York painter we are proud to have hosted here in residence at Il Palmerino. Painting since she was a teenager, it was the moment she touched the brushes and paint, she knew she had found herself. Painting was her first great love.
Surrounded by the spectacular views and beaches of Long Island's East End, landscape has always been one of the main subjects in her work, but as the artist eloquently explains, it was portraiture and figure painting that taught her to understand landscapes. Painting a landscape or a human subject is the same for her. She is inspired by shapes, by the ability of a body to move and inhabit a space, by the way the physical space and the figure interact and the expression of humanity in both.
To Nancy painting is a very intimate process. In her work, she tries to portray something that can touch all viewers, to capture a sense of time and place, and emotion that can be shared universally. The intuitive perception of a landscape, inevitably fleeting and transitory, becomes accessible and comprehensible to all through painting, without the need for words. Nancy seeks an automatic emotional connection with her audience, her aim isn’t to create a commodifiable product but to share a human experience. At Il Palmerino the grace, beauty and warmth, qualities that she finds rare allowed her to open up to her creativity and feel at home.