Overlooking the Chama by Nancy Silvia.
About two-thirds of Nancy Silvia’s works are large-scale landscapes in pastels, completed in her studio in Santa Fe, NM. But the other third are plein-air studies that she considers essential steps in the process of creating those larger paintings, allowing her to “directly engage with the landscape, studying the light and the atmosphere on the spot.” Some of the studies become finished works in their own right.
Silvia graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she met her husband, painter Hiroshi Murata, then earned an MFA from Yale and began her career as an abstract painter working in oils. Following a 10-year “career detour,” she says, “I discovered I was a closet realist, and pastels filled the bill for sketching and as an instant medium with no prep time, no solvent smells, and no cleanup. I could walk into my small workroom, paint for half an hour, and just walk away.”
Nancy Silvia at work on location.
Nancy Silvia’s easel in the landscape near Ghost Ranch, NM.
Silvia and Murata moved to Santa Fe in 2003. She joined the Pastel Society of New Mexico, and five years later she was among the early members of Plein Air Painters of New Mexico, for which she served as president in 2012. The state has provided her with a wealth of inspiration. “I’ve been in love with the Taos area and Ghost Ranch,” she says. “It’s a really compelling and beautiful landscape, especially for an easterner. And I’m particularly fond of painting skies.”
Those passions, and the immediacy of Silvia’s chosen medium, are on full display in APPROACHING RAIN AT GHOST RANCH, completed in July two years ago during a group paint-out. “I stationed myself across from the Pedernal,” she says—the iconic mesa that Georgia O’Keeffe loved to paint—“and the rain was coming, up in the left-hand quadrant. The weather eventually cut me off, but I feel the painting includes all the essentials without a bit of overwork that would have dissipated the energy in the piece.” To learn more, visit http://nancysilvia.com.
Approaching Rain at Ghost Ranch by Nancy Silvia.
Arroyo Rhythm by Nancy Silvia.