nan porter

It was the light and shadow of Truro on Cape Cod which made me consider trying to paint. Something about the classic cottage and houses that stood so proud and strong thru the years of ocean breezes really inspired me. I always look for some classic icon of that old Cape life like bikes, clothes lines etc to reinforce the history of my paintings.

Part of the world around me is living in Boston. The environment is full of spaces to be rendered, surfaces to be explored and the ugly-pretty that catches my eye.

I don't know when I started to see nature as patterns of shapes, lines and beats of the paint brush. These are some of the explorations I have done to try to capture that. I still am working to get there. 

I took a wonderful class with Nancy McCarthy at The Castle Hill School in Truro a few summers ago and just started to free myself by using only a palette knife. This is the results.

I have been trying new things over the year to get closer to a simple story grounded in reality but not being strictly tied to the real world we observe thru our eyes. These are some small studies I did to play with this approach.

Still exploring and examining the intersection of two colors and moving away from a realistic representation towards an emotional response, I started doing some studies on panels and canvases to free myself up.

I often start my explorations of what I want to paint thru a quick watercolor play. I might use color pencils with this to draw out the emotion, the patterns I see in nature.