Nancy Bertelsen has lived in West Marin for fifty years, surrounded by nature, often walking, gazing, letting the earth claim her attention. She is drawn to paint the dynamics of land, bodies of water, and landscapes including human interventions. She speaks of painting as a way of joining and honoring earthly elements, the sources of our lives — root systems, rock, water, and growing species.
Bertelsen also paints as an inquiry: seeing the act of painting as a meeting ground between earthly phenomena and human consciousness. How does creative expression get close to acknowledging the whole of the human as a Being inextricable from the earth?
Nancy writes: The works express an ever-increasing kinship with the earth in its various manifestations; how it appears in light and darkness, not just through sight, but with felt-glimpses of the ongoing generativity of the Earth?
I ask questions as I go: How to render the feel of a particular tree, or a rocky field, the rocks strewn by weather events? Or the feel of setting out into a large expanse of water? Or offer an imagined view of what lies beneath the earth, images that might inspires a viewer’s curiosity and intimacy with the living systems that gives us life.
