Nancy Bacon Paintings

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Nancy Bacon Paintings was a solo, retrospective painting exhibition featuring acrylic on canvas works from the last twenty-five years. The Erie Art Museum's Heather Gill spoke to the artist recently about this exhibit, which was on display in the Erie Art Museum's main galleries from November 8 through December 22, 1996.

Q. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about your art background.

A. I can hardly remember the time when I wasn't doing some kind of painting. My first memory was in kindergarten or first grade and I had a wonderful teacher. In those days you had an art room. I don't think you have that so much in Erie anymore. You went into the art room and the teacher said, "I want you to do a painting and I don't want you to use the colors you normally would, just use your imagination, do anything you want to." And I remember the painting: I did a sailboat on yellow water with a green sky and the sailboat was blue. And that was the beginning of my experimentation.

Q. What do you usually paint?

A. When I paint it is recognizable subject matter. It comes out of my head usually. I may set up a still life with some teacups and a plate and some flowers, but of course the flowers don't live and sometimes I'll only use three flowers, but it will turn out to be a bouquet. I look at my setup but I do not reproduce it. I hope I reproduce the feeling in the painting. I try not to reproduce the exact plate or flower. It's fine if artists want to do that but that is not my thing. Mine comes from my head, from my imagination.

Q. In your paintings, what kind of subject matter do you use?

A. I have used most everything. I've used the figure and I've used, we've always had a dog around the house, and I've painted the dog. We live in a house with a lot of glass so a lot of my paintings are inside/outside paintings. There might be a landscape outside and a table with teacups on the inside.

Q. Why do you paint? Is it just part of who you are?

A. It's definitely part of who I am. As I told you, I started this when I was in kindergarten. I think that, of course, I was nurtured by my parents who were very interested in the arts. My mother was a musician, my father was in advertising arts, and we were taken to museums as far back as I can remember. It's always been a part of my life, the same way fixing cars is a part of some people's lives. As I say I'm not driven, but I can't imagine not painting. I don't know what I would do.