Suddenly you see: a profile of Nancy Rice

Nancy Rice

“It doesn’t matter if you’ve never picked up a paintbrush in your life,” says Nancy Rice.  “You can come to my classes and have a blast.”  Nancy teaches her special technique of abstract painting, using fluid acrylic paint and a squirt bottle.  Students create “free flowing, unique paintings.”  Nancy teaches at her studio, located at the Raynor Activity Center in Sunnyvale.  She’s taught abstract and realistic painting in oils, watercolor and acrylic for ten years, and been a painter for over thirty years.  Though she’s worked at jobs that range from banking to web design, Nancy has kept at her painting since before she was in high school.

Nancy sold her first painting, a realistic watercolor she says she stole out of National Geographic, to her high school science teacher.  She always loved drawing and painting, and comes from an artistic family.  Her father was an architect, and her grandmother ran a dance studio, where Nancy learned ballet as a child.  Her grandfather was a woodworker who made beautiful, inlaid boxes.  All of these influences contributed to Nancy’s creativity, though she says it took her a long time to get good at art.  She moved to the Bay Area from the Midwest when she was in college, and spent the next several years taking life drawing and painting.  “Sitting in class and looking at a human being for hours on end – you learn proportion, negative space – and all of a sudden I could see.”  Nancy recalls that magical moment when she stopped copying and could actually see on her own.  “All of a sudden, something clicked.”

After spending several years in Southern California, Nancy returned to the Bay Area in the early 1990s.  At this point she really needed a change, and began throwing paint at canvasses ala Jackson Pollock.  “I didn’t know what I was doing, but things started to emerge from the paint.” Faces, figures, dragons, and spookier pictures came out of this period.  Soon she got these dark images out of her system, and returned to painting realistic watercolors.  She was also teaching watercolor then. 

In 2002, Nancy got bored with realism, and went back to the abstract painting she had engaged in a few years before.  Using acrylics again, she discovered many new advances in the medium that allowed her to expand her abstract painting techniques.  In 2005, she had a show at Gallery 9 in Los Altos, which was one of her most successful.  In the show, titled “The Abstracted Landscape and a Dozen Roses,” Nancy hung her realistic watercolors next to her abstract acrylics.  She sold several pieces at that show, and felt confident that she was moving in the right direction artistically.

As far as influences go, Nancy’s biggest role model in art is Georgia O’Keeffe.  As one of the first women accepted into the mainstream art world, O’Keeffe did not listen to those who tried to discourage her.  “Never give up!” is something Nancy tells her students, and artists in general.  “There might be better ways to make a living – and worse ways – but don’t give up even if you aren’t making any money at it.”  Nancy has persevered through personal problems, marital crises and family issues.  In spite of these and other setbacks, she still spends about twenty hours per week painting.  “I do a little art every day,” she says.  “On the weekends, I’m always at my studio.”  Other influences include Dali, Winslow Homer, Thomas Hart Benton (whose most famous student was Jackson Pollock), and the Impressionists.  

Although Nancy’s art is abstract, landscapes and florals come naturally to her.  She turns a painting around to find if it “reads” well – an ability she’s developed after thirty years of painting.  The painting will tell her what it is, i.e., “I’m a landscape, a hillside, waves, or the beach.”  When the painting looks right from all angles, Nancy knows she’s finished.

Nancy wants people to have their own interpretations of her paintings.  “Make it yours, something you’d enjoy hanging in your home.”  When she painted representational art, she grew tired of hearing people identify, correctly, what the picture showed.  For Nancy, abstract art opens far more possibilities.

Nancy is part of the Silicon Valley Open Studio Invitational Exhibition – 2009, presented by Silicon Valley Open Studios and Pacific Art League of Palo Alto.  For more information on Nancy Rice’s classes, visit her on Facebook.