Nancy Keyser was on a roll this summer, painting every day at her summer home on Green Bay in Southern Door County.
“When I get back to my home in Virginia, my other life often interferes with my painting, but here I am getting to work every morning and the work is flowing for me this summer.”
She describes her work as representational, but loose representation. She likes barns and shapes, architectural things, she explains, launching into descriptions of barns and outhouses on farms around the area, barns that have too often fallen apart, were torn down and replaced by charmless metal structures.
Bales of hay are added to a foreground sketch of a barn where none appeared in the photograph -- that’s just a part of the advantage of painting over photography.
“My students often start with very tight images ob they think it has to be exactly like the photo, I try to get them to change the photo to get a better composition, why paint the photo? If you have a photo, use it as a reference but not something you want to copy. It’s the hardest thing to get them away from that.
“I tell them what someone told me, that Mother Nature didn’t go to art school, so you really have to make it a better composition even if it wasn’t like that in the field. Sometimes you exaggerate things in a painting, like the shadows, to get a better design. There comes a point in a painting where you do what is best for the painting and don’t worry about making it look like a photo.”
This summer she has found the more painting she does, the easier it gets.
She points to a painting of a farmer on a horse-drawn tiller with four-foot high steel-rimmed wheels, whose roundness is echoed in the round rumps of the horses and providing a bit of inspiration to Keyser, who is tempted to create an image of rumps on barstools at the Red Room in Sturgeon Bay, one of her family’s favorite lunch spots.
Not to worry, patrons -- she takes sufficient liberty with her subjects that few behinds would be recognizable in a finished painting.
“I try to get looser and looser, in my painting,” she added.
She points to a painting of a farmer on a horse-drawn tiller, the roundness of the wheels echoed in the round rumps of the horses and providing a bit of inspiration to Keyser, who is tempted to create a version, in photography or watercolor, of rumps on barstools at the Red Room in Sturgeon Bay, one of her family’s favorite haunts.
Not to worry, patrons -- she takes sufficient liberty with her subjects that few behinds would be recognizable in a finished painting.
In 25 years of watercolor painting, she has continued to pursue learning, taking classes from painters she admires -- Gerhard Miller, Phil Austen, Jack Anderson, Nancy Crosby, Bridget Austin and Emmett Johns, among others, even while students in Virginia eagerly sign up to learn from her.
She showed her work this summer at the Martinez Studio, focused on rural Wisconsin, not necessarily Door County. And no lighthouses.
“I used to paint lighthouses and landmarks, but I think that has been pretty well taken care of in the art world up here, and it doesn’t fascinate me any more.”
She points to a picture of a chicken with a spotted breast and sides against a fluid background of blue and rust. She used the method she learned from Sharon Crosbie, who starts with a light wash, then added the chicken, and then darkened the background to make the chicken pop out. Working with wet, or partly wet paint, some of the watercolors will blend into each other.
The painting took about two weeks, starting with the light and then adding dark areas as she went along..
“You look at it and see what it needs.”
Watercolor requires some careful planning, especially when it comes to choosing the areas that will be white -- you can’t go back and paint white over dark the way an oil painter can.
Keyser, however, said she doesn’t find it harder.
“Not for me because I don’t know how to do oil or acrylic. I am going to take some classes in oil, but your brain has to reverse itself. Emmett (Johns) does everything, but most people find a niche they are comfortable in.” She has taken several courses with him including figure drawing and pastel classes.
“Emmett is a fantastic teacher. He is is the most multi-talented artist up here, I think. Portraits, abstractions and landscapes -- he does them all well.
“Usually I study with is someone because I really like their work and want to see their process. By watching their process you can learn a lot. This spring I studied with Tom Francesconi in Ellison Bay. I t was wonderful just observing how he uses the brushes and learning what goes on in his mind before he starts to paint, which he is very good at explaining. I don't expect to come out with a painting from a class, I just come out with ideas.”
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