|
NANCY FLETCHER CASSELL
About the Artist Nancy Fletcher Cassell has lived and worked in the Greater Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky area for the past thirty years. Her studio is located in the Essex Studio complex in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earned her MFA in drawing from the University of Cincinnati in 1979 and received a B.S. in painting and art education from Middle Tennessee State University in 1970. She also studied as a full-time student at The Art Academy of Cincinnati 1974 to 1975. Cassell began her career as a graphic designer in Nashville, Tennessee and moved to the Cincinnati area when she married in 1973. She taught painting, drawing and design at Mount Saint Joseph College from 1980 to 1984. Currently, she lives in Northern Kentucky and is a self-employed artist who is well represented in regional and national exhibitions. Cassell is the recipient of three Al Smith Fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, an NEA Regional Fellowship from the Southern Arts Federation, two Summerfair, Inc. grants, a grant from Art Matters, and two grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She has received residency fellowships at Yaddo and The Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Cassell has received numerous show and purchase awards. Her work has been published in New American Paintings Magazine and The Artist's Magazine. She was one of fourteen Kentucky artists featured in the KET public television special "Looking at Painting". She has work in the permanent collections of The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock Arkansas, The Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, Ohio, and the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art, Owensboro, Kentucky, plus work in numerous public and private collections. Artist's Statement I belong to certain places, certain trees, and a certain kind of motion occurring in the landscape and the human form. I found many years ago, that when I paint or draw the landscape, human forms spontaneously occur. For me, memories, the marks of handwriting, sensations and places merge and remerge in an abstract language through visual media and poems. Quilts made by generations of women in my family have influenced the large installations I create. Also time spent traveling across the U.S. by car, as my father was career military, gave me a different experience of the land, showing itself in flashes similar to animation and magazine layouts. I often choose to work in black and white as well as color. The black and white pieces allow for very densely packed compositions. This method welcomes viewers to enter the flow and establish a feeling for the sculptural forms occurring in each piece. I trust viewers to understand abstraction as a code full of meaning, as artwork that reveals the rich layers of the interior of the artist. These works act as a type of visual--psychological journal. They allow me to speak both directly and indirectly about the processes of life and to recreate an internal environment to share with others. Nancy Fletcher Cassell, 2011
For more information on Nancy Fletcher
Cassell, please visit
the artist's personal site |
