MEET THE ARTIST

Nancy Kathryn Wilson

Nancy K. Wilson is a Scottsdale, Arizona artist whose work in sculpture and painting is displayed in homes and collections throughout the United States and in Asia. Like many artists, Nancy is multi-dimensional, exploring and expressing her talents through drawing, painting and sculpting.

She began her formal art education with studies in humanities at Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois. Technical skills developed at the same time while studying with individual anatomists, painters and sculptors renowned for their mastery in human interest subject. A six-year study with sculptor/educator, Helen Blair Crosbie, known for her bronze portraits of famous individuals throughout the United States, further developed interpretive skills.

Nancy recently produced a series of life-size portraits in bronze for the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine and contributed to a series of portraits installed at Indiana University School of Medicine, in addition to private commissioned projects.

As student and teacher, Nancy recognized that there is too little of the principles of Asian design, specifically Chinese, being taught in our schools. Seeking to reinforce her own work, she set out to find private instruction and studied with the finest of Chinese philosopher/painters. She has put serious study to the Asia influence on contemporary western hemisphere painting and sculpture. As a result, her work has captured acclaim in China and here at home. In a yin-yang sense, her Chinese ink and brush paintings are simultaneously strong and delicate, a uniquely western contemporary interpretation of Chinese tradition.

In April 1999, 35 of her traditional/contemporary Chinese paintings were exhibited in China in Qufu, birth place of Confucius, the Academy for Confucius Studies and Fine Arts, and in Beijing at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Gallery of Contemporary Art. In October 2000, by invitation (and the only foreigner artist), three of her paintings were exhibited in the China History Museum alongside the works of traditional painters and calligraphers of all provinces of China.

In all her work, Nancy has found that she is best able to relate her views of reality and imagination through simplicity of form and strength in design. It is her aim in her sculpture, her paintings and her drawings, to capture and to share the curiosity and the sensitivity she believes we each feel toward our humanness.

Nancy K. Wilson has been a juried member of the Arizona Artists Guild since 1989.