Nan Ring

“These Almost Lost Pieces”  is a site-specific installation spanning decades of my artwork and including my original poems that is currently on view at Brassworks Gallery in Montclair NJ. It stands as homage to artists that are lifelong important inspirations to me both artistically and personally, and to the evolution of my own artistic self and love of the handmade. I first experienced an appreciation of the handmade from makers in my family, who knitted, tatted, crocheted, embroidered, baked and cooked, creating fine handmade objects that all bore the print of the maker.

 The hallways of 105 Grove suggested to me the evolution of art making as metaphoric passages artists traverse, walking arm in arm with artistic role models we engage in conversation. Whether alive or long gone before us, these artists influence us on our way to our own “rooms.” Rooms where perhaps we develop our unique artistic voice for a week, a season or maybe more, leaving to roam the halls again when needed, returning to ourselves in our own time. Viewers encounter my work’s progression over time, my life’s movement through time, time told through the artists’ lives I include, and their own experience of time as they pass through the exhibition.

At the nexus of written and visual language, I unearth, reexamine and interrogate history to reimagine the biographies of the artists in my poems through a feminist lens. Including both women and men, fragments of the poems are presented between the artworks. The poems appear in their entirety at the end of the hallways.

 The title poem, “These Almost Lost Pieces”, is about Vivian Maier, a photographer who died leaving behind thousands of undeveloped negatives, later discovered and developed, securing her place as one of the most renowned street photographers in the world.

 My poem “Bird”, includes George Sand, a female writer who dressed as a man to move freely through Paris society and to publish. “Signs of Snow” includes still life painter Giorgio Morandi, whose reclusive behavior nevertheless afforded him the undying interest of the art world, and futurist Benedetta Cappa, a contemporary of Morandi who languished in obscurity more than once. In “Seventeen Claras” still life painter Clara Peeters appears, about whom almost nothing is known since the records of her personal history were lost while only her paintings survived.

“Intimast,” is an invented title I embrace because it so beautifully captures my passion for the vast contained in the small moment. I create visual poetry in the form of individual artworks meant to be read like lines of a poem, often alongside the text of my poetry. Each piece is unique, handmade objects that are in fact part of a series; the unifying thread being my hand, voice, and eye. Here, in these hallways, I offer the viewer my own small moments — of life, art, and the pursuit of visual poetics.

This image list with prices is comprised of the 68 images in my solo exhibition of original poetry and fine art, “These Almost Lost Pieces” at Brassworks Gallery in Montclair, NJ, opening April 5th 2024 and going through mid-August. The exhibition space includes entire poems and fragments of poems installed alongside visual art. The exhibition is open 7am to 7pm when the building is open at 105 Grove Street, and by appointment in the evenings and on weekends: nancy.ring@verizon.net

“These Almost Lost Pieces” is a site-specific installation spanning decades of my artwork and including my original poems. It stands as homage to artists that are lifelong important inspirations to me both artistically and personally, and to the evolution of my own artistic self and love of the handmade. I first experienced an appreciation of the handmade from makers in my family, who knitted, tatted, crocheted, embroidered, baked and cooked, creating fine handmade objects that all bore the print of the maker.

The hallways of 105 Grove suggested to me the evolution of art making as metaphoric passages artists traverse, walking arm in arm with artistic role models we engage in conversation. Whether alive or long gone before us, these artists influence us on our way to our own “rooms.” Rooms where perhaps we develop our unique artistic voice for a week, a season or maybe more, leaving to roam the halls again when needed, returning to ourselves in our own time. Viewers encounter my work’s progression over time, my life’s movement through time, time told through the artists’ lives I include, and their own experience of time as they pass through the exhibition.

At the nexus of written and visual language, I unearth, reexamine and interrogate history to reimagine the biographies of the artists in my poems through a feminist lens. Including both women and men, fragments of the poems are presented between the artworks. The poems appear in their entirety at the end of the hallways.

The title poem, “These Almost Lost Pieces”, is about Vivian Maier, a photographer who died leaving behind thousands of undeveloped negatives, later discovered and developed, securing her place as one of the most renowned street photographers in the world.

My poem “Bird”, includes George Sand, a female writer who dressed as a man to move freely through Paris society and to publish. “Signs of Snow” includes still life painter Giorgio Morandi, whose reclusive behavior nevertheless afforded him the undying interest of the art world, and futurist Benedetta Cappa, a contemporary of Morandi who languished in obscurity more than once. In “Seventeen Claras” still life painter Clara Peeters appears, about whom almost nothing is known since the records of her personal history were lost while only her paintings survived.

“Intimast,” is an invented title I embrace because it so beautifully captures my passion for the vast contained in the small moment. I create visual poetry in the form of individual artworks meant to be read like lines of a poem, often alongside the text of my poetry. Each piece is unique, handmade objects that are in fact part of a series; the unifying thread being my hand, voice, and eye. Here, in these hallways, I offer the viewer my own small moments — of life, art, and the pursuit of visual poetics.

Nan Ring 2024

Salt Kitchen: A Mighty Woman is a work-in-progress in response to the current state of the world. Where the world’s story spills into my story is where the artworks begin. Thirteen large painting are each titled after lines from the poem on the Statue of Liberty, The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus which includes the words, “a mighty woman.” The images of the paintings are generated from an original prose poem I wrote in response to Lazarus’ verse, and the women’s faces in the paintings are based on Lady Liberty’s face. This poem is embroidered on a cloth table cover laid out on a long rectangular table that will occupy the center of the gallery. A set of baking tools such as a rolling pin and wooden spoons covered with poem fragments on small shelves and found objects are included for their patina of history and memory, continuing the dialogue between paintings and text.

I am the daughter of an immigrant family, a family that moved in order to survive, arriving on Ellis Island when the statue stood for something very different to immigrants than it might today. Salt Kitchen: A Mighty Woman is about surviving the flood - the flood of violence, of grief, of food and water insecurity, of climate change, of loss of rights, of prejudice and exclusion, of reckoning and more. The part of the title that reads Salt Kitchen comes from the word "salarium," once meaning salary, and where the saying "worth her salt" comes from. The salt of tears, of oceans, of worth and the work it once designated as worthy for pay - or not - is part of the subject of these artworks as well. The word kitchen in the title refers to the setting of almost all the paintings, a setting that represents the domestic as both home and country.

As an interdisciplinary visual artist, published poet and author, my work is conceptually driven, using the mediums that best serve the concept. A common theme in my work is interiors: physical interiors such as rooms, interior states of being communicated through figurative works, interiors like heartlands and depths. The interiority of those identifying as women in particular is addressed in the work through the depiction of the need to nourish, in spirit as well as body, in tension with the larger forces of the world. The hunger that can’t be sated globally where abundance flows for few and not for others works in opposition to the old beliefs that women should stay in the kitchen despite all that goes on outside the window. In my life, the old ways, inseparable from a prescribed life of domesticity, were passed down generation to generation in handwritten recipes along with stories of ancestors who survived hardship and loss, especially during the Holocaust, with persistence and imagination. This huge legacy of women dedicated to a domestic life never fit me as an artist though I owe it a debt of gratitude. My essential question as an artist and as a woman is “How can I stay connected to the past without being held back by it when the world asks for so much more from me?

In terms of materials, the paintings are oil on canvas created with transparent glazes. I’m interested in layering, translucency and transparency, a method that emphasizes light, intensifies color and further creates a sense of interiority and history as light passes through the layers, each one taking 24 hours to dry. There might be ten to twenty layers of glaze for each color change.

This is a storyteller’s painting — a still image from a reverie in progress — and it’s designed to linger in your mind long after your eyeballs have finished the lab”or of looking.” Tris McCall, Jersey City Times

These drawings and paintings are meditations on light, color and geometry, and about being fully present with the world. Light often represents spirituality, but rather than use the dichotomy of light and shadow, I think of them as being about light and the unknown. The world needs our attention and compassion now more than ever, and I hope the viewer will experience these quiet openings as spaces to enter imaginatively.

From top to bottom:

All This To Say That In The Library The Light Called Your Name, pastel on paper, 24 x 20 inches

All This To Say You’re Still Here, pastel on paper, 24 x 20 inches

All This To Say That I Know You’re Always, pastel on paper, 24 x 20 inches

All This To Say That The Trees Outside the Kitchen Window Remember, pastel on paper, 24 x 20 inches

All This To Say There’s Time If You Need To Recharge, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches

All This To Say That I Never Lost Sight Of You, pastel on paper, 20 x 24 inches

All This To Say I’m Thinking About You And Where We Are In Our Lives, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 inches

Our true nature is impermanence, something I read at a time when I was interested in Eastern spiritual practices. Once we recognize our true nature, the writings suggest, we will be more present during our brief time on earth. I know this each time I sit with my 95 year old mother and observe the quiet beauty of her face lined with experience, joy and sorrow. I know it when I look at my son, an ever changing, evolving constellation of touching moments. I know it when I paint these paintings, to me more real than reality in feeling with their brushstrokes that disappear at the edges and drip into the silent, negative space surrounding the figure, a figure intensely present even as it is slowly leaving. The way the figure yearns for its object is also part of the pieces; an old woman, my grandmother, closes her eyes and lifts her face to kiss her long-gone husband in memory, a child bends her head reverently and reaches out her fingers to play a piano that is not pictured, and many more instances of how we experience the world in our bodies, both its beauty and its burden. Intentionally painted with quick, gestural strokes meant to evoke emotion and ephemerality rather than verisimilitude, these oils on canvas are testimony to how I perceive myself and those around me as beings of impermanence whose choices nevertheless can make a lasting impact. Who are we and what is our legacy?

Various sizes from 30 x 24 inches to 40 x 30 inches.

A Mighty Woman is a series of works about surviving the flood - the flood of violence, of grief, of food and water insecurity, of climate change, loss of rights, of reckoning and more. Where the world’s story spills into my story is where the paintings begin. I am the daughter of an immigrant family, a family that moved in order to survive. The legacy of women dedicated to a domestic life never fit me as an artist though I owe it a huge debt of gratitude. This series is generated from a prose poem I wrote in which this painting is the centerpiece of thirteen large works in progress. The initial inspiration came from 50’s advertising that illustrated women as subservient and limited, and evolved to referencing the poem by Emma Lazurus on the Statue of Liberty. They are painted with transparent oil glazes one atop another like sheets of colored glass.

After a long year of grief for the overwhelming amount of deaths from disease and violence, I find that my work has taken a turn toward a desire for light, a sense of poetry and color. A return to joy feels urgent, along with a return to a feeling of spirit, of hope for new beginnings, and of willingness for reckonings and reparations.

I use a technique of glazing layers of pure color one atop another that interact like layered sheets of colored glass; the light passes through the layers, each of which take 24 hours or more to dry, and the viewer perceives the color created by the combinations. The process is a balance of control and chance; there is accident in the way the glazes pour and flow as well as my intervention with palette knife, brush and rag. This process is a conversation between myself and my materials, and is part of the work that is important to me; in life as well as in art, it’s important to practice both give and take.

What is not possible to see from my online images is that the surface of these paintings, when dry, shines like enamel, and in person, the color has a transparent glow.

I have a passionate engagement with paint, its body. Just like the human body, it can be thick and thin, fluid, pliant or resistant by turns, and dries with the passage of time. The gestures of the human body including, for instance, the turn of a head, shifting planes of the back or a bend of neck, translate easily into gestures of paint – swipes of the brush, large passages of quiet, meditative glazes and details, and the simple act of keen observation of a subject that is being transcribed into visual language.

“My Sapphire” oil on linen, 48 x 36 inches, 2021

Confronting darkness is a human condition, and even more poignant for those who have the capacity to confront themselves within that depth.

Top to bottom:

“Light in August” oil on panel, 10 x 10 inches, 2021

“Gaze to Sea” oil on linen, 30 x 20 inches, 2021

These narrative paintings are created using a Flemish Old Master technique of painting a monochrome underpainting in grays, black and white and then covering it with colored glazes like thin sheets of glass. The light passes through the layers, creating the color.

From top to bottom:

Light in August, oil on canvas, 5 x 5 inches, 2021 SOLD

New Morning, oil on panel, 4 x 4 inches, 2021 SOLD

Blues 1, oil on panel, 4 x 4 inches, 2021 SOLD

Blues 2, oil on panel, 4 x 4 inchesm 2021 SOLD

Rose 1, oil on panel, 4 x 4 inches, 2021 SOLD

I started these watercolors on paper at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic when I was confined to my home studio, and I continue to make them now in addition to my art-making in my studio outside my home. Most of them were painted between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. each morning before the sun rose. They were my first, quiet moments of every new day, and I used this time to try out new ideas, experiment freely, or simply to be present with objects I love, such as a pair of turnips, and depict them just as they are. The tradition of painting still life objects is very old and during times of stress, such as during war or pandemics, artists sometimes turn to still life to ennoble the safe spaces of home and the comfort of daily rituals and domestic space. My paintings of still life also celebrate my art materials, including things like the jars I use for water or other painting mediums, erasers and paint brushes. They are painted in a loose, gestural style that is meant to evoke ideas of the impermanence of life. These paintings represent some of fifty pieces, ongoing. Most of these are 11 x 14 inches, 9 x 12 inches, or 8 x 8 inches.

SOLD, oil on canvas, 24” x 18”’

This painting is from a series entitled "Veiled Figures." I love the body and all it contains; its memory, form, desire and emotion. Veils interest me because of the way they disrupt the figure and change the silhouette. Their transparency creates intricacy and mystery — shrouding, shielding — that I find satisfying visually and emotionally. The gray color is a mixture of Prussian blue, raw umber and white oil paint, a Flemish old master technique that I sometimes finish with transparent glazes painted in layers like sheets of colored glass.

oil on canvas, 16” x 16”, Private Collection

This painting is from a series entitled "Veiled Figures." I love the body and all it contains; its memory, form, desire and emotion. Veils interest me because of the way they disrupt the figure and change the silhouette. Their transparency creates intricacy and mystery — shrouding, shielding — that I find satisfying visually and emotionally. The gray color is a mixture of Prussian blue, raw umber and white oil paint, a Flemish old master technique that I sometimes finish with transparent glazes painted in layers like sheets of colored glass.

oil on canvas, 24” x 18” SOLD

This painting is from a series entitled "Veiled Figures." I love the body and all it contains; its memory, form, desire and emotion. Veils interest me because of the way they disrupt the figure and change the silhouette. Their transparency creates intricacy and mystery — shrouding, shielding — that I find satisfying visually and emotionally. The gray color is a mixture of Prussian blue, raw umber and white oil paint, a Flemish old master technique that I sometimes finish with transparent glazes painted in layers like sheets of colored glass.

oil on canvas, 40” x 30”

This painting is from a series entitled "Veiled Figures." I love the body and all it contains; its memory, form, desire and emotion. Veils interest me because of the way they disrupt the figure and change the silhouette. Their transparency creates intricacy and mystery — shrouding, shielding — that I find satisfying visually and emotionally. The gray color is a mixture of Prussian blue, raw umber and white oil paint, a Flemish old master technique that I sometimes finish with transparent glazes painted in layers like sheets of colored glass.

oil on canvas, 12” x 12” SOLD

This painting is from a series entitled "Veiled Figures." I love the body and all it contains; its memory, form, desire and emotion. Veils interest me because of the way they disrupt the figure and change the silhouette. Their transparency creates intricacy and mystery — shrouding, shielding — that I find satisfying visually and emotionally. The gray color is a mixture of Prussian blue, raw umber and white oil paint, a Flemish old master technique that I sometimes finish with transparent glazes painted in layers like sheets of colored glass.

From top:

SOLD, Letetia in Veil, oil on canvas, 12” x 12”, 2019

Letetia with a Pearl Earring, oil on panel, 10” x 10”, 2018

Kara in Corset, oil on canvas, 14” x 11”, 2018

These paintings, part of a body of work created along with a wearable fabric garments such as Robe, a garment with fifteen sleeves at the waist and no armholes, are intended to express the emotions of the body. The wearables were worn by models, members of my community, who wrote about their experiences before and after performing in them. Intended to address questions about the emotions of the body, Robe and other wearables that I create enact the many ways that we fit in - or not - to our bodies, our clothes and the planet.

oil on canvas, 40” x 30”, 2019

NFS, Private collection

A photographic collage about the skin we’re in and perceptions of beauty. Comprised of both digital and darkroom photography, original poetry and a painting reproduction. Installed at Parlor Hair Studio, Glenridge Avenue in Montclair, N.J. as part of Fresh Air Montclair Exhibitions, 2020. As part of the project and for community engagement, postcards are available at the site inviting participants to share some writing about the skin they’re in or about another’s skin they love. The post cards can be anonymous and are left alongside the project as testament to our shared and individual experiences of the physical body and our unique interiority.

oil on canvas, 14” x 11”

This painting is part of a body of work created along with a wearable fabric garments such as Robe, a garment with fifteen sleeves at the waist and no armholes, and is intended to express the emotions of the body. The wearables were worn by models, members of my community, who wrote about their experiences before and after performing in them. Intended to address questions about the emotions of the body, Robe and other wearables that I create enact the many ways that we fit in - or not - to our bodies, our clothes and the planet.

This volume of poetry, Gateposts with No Gate: The Leg Paint Project, by Peter Waldor, Shanti Press, 2018, contains four of my drawings and one fabric sculpture in addition to other artists’ works. The connection of written language to my work, especially poetry, is important to my process. I want the work to function the way a poem does, allowing multiple interpretations, resisting the viewer, evolving as the viewer evolves.

ALL IMAGES, Watercolor on paper, 11” x 9”

These paintings are done using a film negative as a reference. I’m interested in the way the light and dark areas exchange positions in the negative and create a visual poem, placing light where it is usually dark and vice versa. The images also represent a conversation with the human figure as well as with the paint itself. What interests me is the way the liquid paint changes the forms of the figure as it flows, creating areas of abstraction that feel emotional. I paint the figure because I love the body and all it contains, its memory, form, desire and imagination. What I want to do most of all with my paintings is to create visual poetry; to bring the invisible into the light.

Nadege in Robe 2, oil and pencil on canvas, 12” x 9”, 2018 Private Collection

7 of 9 Paintings SOLD, An Intimate History of Milkweed, nine 4” x 4” oils on panel and one painted double milkweed pod, 2017, is an installation of small paintings intended to address questions of intimacy and motherhood. Painted in the old Flemish technique of placing multiple layers of glazes like sheets of glass over a monochromatic under-painting, these small paintings are intended to be read like lines of a poem with a long thread into the past.

From top to bottom:

Gaze to Sea, charcoal pencil and white chalk on paper, 30” x 22”, 2021

Longing, charcoal pencil on paper, 30” x 22”, 2017

Degas’ Dancers’ Skirt, charcoal pencil on paper, 9” x 11”, 2017

Noam, charcoal pencil on newsprint, 11” x 14”, 2017

Noam 2, charcoal pencil on newsprint, 11” x 14”, 2017

This interactive wearable performative fabric sculpture, Robe, muslin fabric, thread, polyfill, 60” x 72” x 15”, 2017, has fifteen sleeves at the waist and no arm holes. It was worn by models, members of my community, who wrote about their experience before and after performing in it. Intended to address questions about the emotions of the body, Robe enacted the many ways that we fit in - or not - to our bodies, our clothes and the planet.

charcoal, pleather, muslin, pencil, thread, 16” x 7” x 1”, 2017

This drawing is part of a body of work created along with a wearable fabric sculpture, Robe, with fifteen sleeves at the waist and no armholes, intended to express the emotions of the body. Models, members of my community, performed in the piece. I photographed them, drew them, painted them, and mediated some of the pieces in image-editing software.

Below:

Chavi, digital print, 14” x 11”, 2018

Letetia, digital print of oil painting mediated in PhotoShop, 14” x 11”, 2018

muslin fabric, thread, 60” x 24” x 1” 2017

Below: Everyone I Wish I Knew, muslin fabric, thread, 72” x 180” 2017

Everyone I Wish I Knew is a fabric sculpture that is essentially a graph of the percentage of women and people of color shown in major art museums across the United States.

From top to bottom: SOLD, The End Stories, colored pencil on paper, 20” x 25”, 2014, The Looking Down Sky, pencil on paper, 16 1/2” x 12”, 2014, What the Bird Has Forgotten, sepia pencil on paper, 12” 19”, 2014, Mapping an Invisible and Ravenous Hunger, sepia pencil on paper, 12” x 19”, 2014.

In the heart of Wyoming County, Pennsylvania, where hydraulic fracturing wells are prevalent, I worked as an artist-in-residence at Soaring Gardens Artists’ Retreat, Laceyville, to create drawings about the rural landscape. Immersed in the bucolic countryside and farming culture of the surrounding area, I ran headlong into hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking.” The tension created by the natural landscape and the people who endure there set against a backdrop of man-made geometric hydraulic fracturing wells interested me. The drawings, isolated in empty space, speak of the deep country quiet and the disappearing landscape.

Everyone I’ve Ever Fed is composed of fabric donated to me by the community of people that I have fed in my life. Viewers and participants are invited to donate fabric or food for the hungry to the project. Embedded with photo transfers of feminist imagery, this interactive installation of an apron 15 feet wide and 12 feet high, still growing, is intended to represent both the beauty and the burden of women’s work. This project will continue to evolve with continuing donations of fabric and food.

Pictured from top to bottom: Everyone I’ve Ever Fed (displayed on dress dummy) Nadege Performing in Everyone I’ve Ever Fed, digital print, 2018, Detail of Everyone I’ve Ever Fed, single panel, and Detail of Everyone I’ve Ever Fed, installation view.

SOLD, Glistening with Plenitude, a title taken from a line in a poem by Jorie Graham, along with several other multi-panel installations of 4” x 4” oil paintings, is intended to be read like lines of a poem. Each panel is painted in the old Flemish technique of laying multiple glass-like glazes over a monochrome underpainting. Arranged horizontally so no design elements like a grid take away from the slow reading of one image at a time, the paintings are presented like film stills representing the way I perceive my life as small, intimate interconnected moments.

My essential question for these oils on canvas is “What Can a Portrait Be?” Painted in a looser, semi-abstract style, they are intended to address questions about inner vs. outer states of being, and to represent the physicality of both paint itself and the figure depicted. From top to bottom: SOLD, Max Back, 14” x 11”, oil on canvas, 2011, Max Digging, 48” x 36”, oil on canvas, 2012, PRIVATE COLLECTION, Rae, 36” x 24”, oil on canvas, 2012.

Materials: Baking ingredients, baking tools, bread, wearable fabric sculpture, a simple wooden table with plain cloth covering.

Performed 2010, Philadelphia, PA at the University of the Arts

Bread for Peace is a performance piece that I wrote as an Iraq war protest while the war was still going on. While baking a challah bread that is deliberately left half-unbraided to speak to the unraveling of the world, I compared the price of ingredients for making life-sustaining homemade challah bread to the prohibitive cost of war. At the end of the performance, I tear off pieces of the freshly baked bread and throw it to audience members to partake.

Cake is an installation of color copies of handwritten recipe pages and hand-painted signs that spanned the path from my living space to my art studio in Philadelphia, PA, 2010. Intended as a map of the creative journey from kitchen to studio, the installation highlighted the handwritten recipe page as a measure of personal and collective history and memory.