NAWA SHOUT OUTS

PATRICIA CHIACO APUZZO

I work with color and the interplay between shapes, light and shadow. Color is the driving force behind my work. Although I think of myself as an abstract painter, I find working figuratively helps to balance and enhance my abstract work. I also become excited by different things and going in different directions and do not limit myself to one type of work. Using and experimenting with a variety of mediums, materials and size has also become an integral part of my creative process. I have been exploring color relationships for my entire career, and I pride myself on the fact that my art is self-contained and refers to nothing outside of itself; it needs no explanation to be fully understood. The goal of my art is to elicit an emotional response from a viewer.

Inspired by the beautifully rendered primitive shapes and figures in cave paintings and ancient African and Aztec art, Blue Innuendo and Centaur Whimsy are part of a series of paintings in which I explored those elements.

NANCY JACY

The Story Behind Getting Closer

“Getting Closer” (29″ x 23″) is a portrait of my son taken at the Butterflies Live Exhibition at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in Richmond, VA. This photograph was selected as the winner of the Butterflies Live Exhibit in 2019 and won our family a year long membership to the Gardens. I took many photographs that day, and I thought that the moment in time that I captured in this photograph, along with the expression of curiosity on David’s face aimed at the resting Tree Nymph Butterfly, would make a great colored pencil piece. This was completed using Prismacolor Premier Pencils, on cold-pressed Strathmore illustration board (500 series), using my own reference photographs and no solvents. I initially sketched out a simple line drawing of the image using graphite pencil on the board as my starting point and used many layers of colored pencil to achieve the final outcome. My goal was to create a vibrant, saturated, painterly feel to the piece. It was completed over a five-month period of time. It was recently juried into the Colored Pencil Society of America’s 28th International Exhibition, by juror, Chris Valle.

Nancy Jacey is a native of Richmond, Virginia, and has had a love for drawing and illustration from a young age. She received a BFA in Studio Art from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, (more commonly known as Virginia Tech,) in 2002, and earned her MFA in Illustration from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2004. She is a recognized member of the Colored Pencil Society of America and the International Guild of Realism. Nancy is an award-winning published artist. Her work has been featured in American Art Collector (April 2020 issue), To the Point (June & November 2020 issues) and Northern Virginia Magazine (January 2020 issue.) Other notable publications are Color Magazine, the Richmond Times Dispatch Newspaper and The Directory of Illustration. In her free time, she teaches classes at her own studio, The Jacey Gallery, in Richmond, Virginia.

In her words, “Go big. Despite what appears to be the current trend of murkiness and minimalism, I prefer minutia and meticulousness. I work in acrylic, oil and colored pencil. Details are important. That is why I prefer to create large-scale, photo realistic works that focus on oft-overlooked characteristics. With that in mind, my process is admittedly a painstaking one, especially with my preference for Prismacolor pencils. My colored pencil works often take hundreds of hours to complete. This is because, to me, each portion of a composition—no matter how small or seemingly insignificant—is just as important as any other part.”