Nancy Fletcher Cassell

Union, Kentucky

Naturemind: Coral Reef;
sumi ink gouache coute,
40" x 30"

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Willem DeKooning, "Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash."

Noguchi said, "We are a landscape of all we have seen", and Susan Griffin, in Woman and Nature has said, " We are nature... nature speaking of nature to nature."

The physical reality of nature and the concept of nature as we perceive it in our minds are not the same. Yet, there is an interplay between the dynamic complexity of nature and the human mind and body that causes us to continually explore, debate and redefine concepts about nature and our role as participants in the natural world. As individuals, we seek places to identify with and to belong to. We claim these places by the feelings we bestow upon them and we long to protect their existence from harm.

Day to day, through direct and indirect means, places encompass me within a barrage of mysterious forms. When I stand outside before a coming storm, a world of images fly around me. While driving images fly past the window of my car. They are all DeKoonings' "glimpse", in animated form. In those moments a memory is deposited and through the art process, I make another image in response to the intensity of the first. I have little desire to copy the appearance of the images I see. It is the interaction and merger with nature, reflecting the human, that attracts me and creates a hybrid view of reality through my painting.

The content and materials of the paintings are also influenced by a strong interest in all forms of handwriting and calligraphy as well as Japanese and Chinese art and culture.

When the paintings are complete, I assemble two-dimensional environments from the works I have created and tape these directly to the wall in horizontal bands. I prefer no barrier to exist between the viewer and the image. In the installations, there are no frames. There are also no signatures on the front surface of the paintings.

I invite the viewer to step inside the work and merge with the intensity and movement of nature and visually join my process.

I also invite viewers to relate personal stories, poems, and written words created in response to their own glimpse of nature. Michael Sullivan, in The Three Perfections quotes a Chinese art historian of the ninth century who said, "Writing and painting have different names but a common body."

There is a mutual sense of renewal in the processes of painting and writing that feeds the restoration of our spirit and the natural world. This merger of internal and external nature creates a refuge and through collaboration, we make a new place with plural possibilities.

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