Nancy Taplin

The rivulets of color caught braiding and twisting toward form in Nancy Taplin’s paintings suggest that even the most loosely strung of coalescences yearns toward its like—and with the same energy that binds its own threads into being.

Taplin finds her preoccupation—and its resolution—in the attack and decay of a line. Her occasional opaque forms, if seen vivisected, reveal the same reaching tendrils composing both surfaces and subcutaneous interiors.

Her recent work begins with small linear drawings in graphite or colored pencil, or larger ones on rag paper with paint. Large paintings on linen she approaches like the drawings on rag paper—moving through the wet surface, drawing into it, letting it dry, and working back over it again—letting the brush have its way with the layers of color, bringing different dimensions into the work.

Nancy Taplin studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design, and has received numerous fellowships and awards for her work. She has exhibited widely in galleries throughout the Northeast. .

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