About the Artist: NANCY MCCALLUM was awarded two degrees by New Mexico State University, receiving her M.F.A. in 1990 and a B.F.A. in 1987.

 

MCCALLUM'S paintings are reflective of the two places she now calls home. She currently lives on a hurricane threatened barrier island off the coast of North Carolina. Having left her Minneapolis home of lakes and rivers, her paintings speak of location/dislocation, missed connections, mist and displacement. The island in the fall, winter, and spring is often wrapped in fog, isolated and lonely. Using a recognizable iconography — landscape — she plays a sort of game from which paintings result.

 

Because she employs recognizable objects and topographies, the paintings appear to be about something specific, although this is primarily an illusion resulting from the process itself. This illusion is carried through with a process of painting image over image, often obscuring the previous painting. MCCALLUM continually sands through layers, in a sense excavating for something in-between the known surfaces. Like ghost stories, some words have found their way into the paintings, but they are usually too obscured to read.

 

MCCALLUM is also drawn to a sense of the uncanny; to work that, however detailed or specific it might appear, at heart is an attempt to portray a mystery. MCCALLUM sometimes refers to her paintings as "romantic landscapes." For her, painting is a primitive process, loosely bound by rules. She works on the floor with the painting lying flat or propped against a wall. There is a sense of intimacy in this process that she seeks to convey in the finished work.