Nancy Bass
My series At the Museum is about making two disparate things work together. Each painting pairs a work of art hanging in a museum gallery with an individual cow responding to it. The series began with an unusual commission from a friend, who asked me to paint a cow before her favorite work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928). I was taken by the challenge of painting a recognizable picture within a picture, and then pairing it with a cow that captures the embedded work’s color, form, mood, and sensibility. The playful and unexpected encounters staged within these paintings reflect the many ways that art moves us as individuals. Every cow at the museum embodies art as experience.
Nancy
Guilford, Connecticut
Nancy Bass
Nancy Bass honors the beauty and character of each animal she portrays. Her paintings explore our relationship with the animal world and the intelligence and innocence of each animal she portrays.
Her first memory of making art is a series of multi-colored poodles created at age three, using every color of crayon in a Crayola box. Bass’s devotion to representing animals has continued unabated.
Bass was born in 1957 in Peoria, IL and studied art at Drake University in Iowa. For thirty-five years, she lived and worked on a farm in Virginia where she raised a herd of cattle with her husband. There she began to develop her first significant body of works: a series of close-up portraits that recognize cows as individual, knowing subjects. Bass has received honors from the Art2Life International Competition, The Artist’s Magazine, American Impressionist Society, American Women Artists, Oil Painters of America, The Richeson 75 Animals, Birds, and Wildlife Competition, and the Bethesda Painting Awards. She now lives and works in Guilford, CT.
Artwork
Artist Statement
My seriesAt the Museumis aboutmakingtwo disparate things work together.Each painting pairs a work of art hanging in a museum gallery with an individualcow responding to it. The series began with an unusual commission from a friend,who asked me to paint a cow before her favorite work in the MetropolitanMuseum of Art, Charles Demuth’sI Saw the Figure 5 in Gold(1928). I was taken bythe challenge of painting a recognizable picture within a picture and then pairing it with a cow that captures the embedded work’s colour, form, mood, and sensibility. The playful and unexpected encounters staged within these paintings reflect the many ways that art moves us as individuals. Every cow at the museum embodies art as an experience.
