Nancy Bell Scott Impresses with Triptych of Lavender-Leaning Lovelies

[Thom Courcelle]

I always feel special to receive Nancy’s handiwork and art…I could say that she always seems to get better and better, but she a seasoned artist, and it’s simply that her pieces always feel “new” somehow…there is always something astonishing to admire, to fall into…

There are several things that hit the right chords with me about Nancy’s particular style… She uses antique book pages—often with interesting verbiage or passages—and isn’t afraid to destroy them in the name of creating something new. They are often layered on top of one another creating interesting cross references and juxtapositions, but then embellishes them (which is a wholly unsatisfactory word for the amount of alteration that Nancy commits to her pieces…perhaps we should say “she creates a covenant of beauty”) with ink, paint, sometimes more collage, and often several ripped-torn iterations of her own painted paper and collage work. The layers-upon-layers of ephemera regurgitated into asemic-like miniatures becomes a window of overlay painting that might resemble being in a field looking up at a northern night sky blossoming with the aurora borealis… or might resemble the unique underbelly of a shimmering rainbow trout glistening the way it only can under water…or it might resemble shadows at dusk in a snowy alcove of forgotten forest… It might be secret arcana spell-work from the faerie realm written on birch bark paper for lost princesses and stolen princes…it might be made with magic paintbrushes that might reveal rainbow sketches when discovered by a beam of sunlight cast from Mount Olympus… I don’t know for sure; I’m still trying to figure-out their particular magic trick secrets.

All I know is I’m grateful for having experienced it…

…Am i standing in the tundra gazing up at auroras?

…Is it the underbelly of a trout darting away under gurgling streams?

…faerie tales of noble kings and nobler rogues and solemn knights that ought not harbor in churches…

…Tales upon stories upon accumulating fables… Are there ever any “new” stories? …or do we recite the same moral warnings over and over as human nature fumbles and repeats its errors again and again…?

…What faerie markings are these upon the snowy landscape?…spells? ...or directions to secret passageways? ...or grim warnings against trespass into knowledge sought too deep? ...a palimpsest on top of moth cocoons burrowed into birch bark?

Inspiring stuff to gaze upon...  Thank you, Nancy!

[Thom Courcelle]

Quite so, Kat!  The nuance of colors she’s spellcast into these pieces are delightful and amazing.

[Katerina Nikoltsou (MomKat)]

Oh, they are fabulous, aren't they!