Nancy Witt

   Nancy Witt is a towering presence in the flourishing artistic community of Richmond, Virginia and beyond. Although her MFA was taken in sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University, she has devoted herself almost exclusively to painting. At work daily in her Ashland, Virginia studio, she has completed over six hundred paintings during her forty-year artistic career. The painting Chess Game, for example, documents her transition from sculptor to painter, as she incorporated three-dimensional forms into this early canvas. She also created red mask in the painting entitled Mask. Other works allude to artistic method. Unfinished Happy Ending, shows the artist painting, and again in the background, photographing. Paintbrushes, palettes, drawing boards and easels, figure prominently in Witt paintings. Her subjects which seem to occupy more than one plane of reality, relate to the meanings of the Greek word, meta--alongside, among, and between. She describes herself as a "meta-realist," not a surrealist, as she proposes that her paintings are based upon order and beliefs.

Windows, 1990 oil on canvas Nancy Witt

   In addition to her MFA, Witt holds a BA, cum laude, in art from Old Dominion University, and completed two years at Richmond Professional Institute (now VCU) in Richmond and at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg. She has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Virginia and in New York, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Illinois, and Maine. She has participated in significant group exhibitions including "Allegorical Table" at Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, "Surrealism Continued" at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC, and "New Directions" at Barbara Fiedler Gallery in Washington, DC. Witt's paintings have been widely collected and may be found in corporate, private, and museum collections, including Wheat First Securities, Circuit City, CSX Corporation, Mint Museum of Art, Phillip Morris Company, Randolph Macon College, Longwood College, University of Virginia, VMI, Wachovia Bank, Randolph-Macon Woman's College and Norfolk and Western Railroad. Since 1970, she has lived and worked in Hanover County in an old gristmill, which she and her family renovated.

Artist's Statement

   A recurring phenomenon, one that has fascinated me over several decades of dealing with images, is people coming to me with a statement beginning, "Do you remember the painting you did that...?" They proceed with a vivid image--frequently of something I never saw in my life. And I love it!   They are so sure it is "my" painting when in reality it is their own. They have internalized the original, and their own psyche has used it to tell them something about themselves.

   People often ask me to "explain" my paintings. I have learned not to do that. It can rob the viewer of the joy of discovery. My interpretation, if I have one, is not the only valid one.

   Because of the complexity of many of the paintings, I'm sure that it might be supposed that they are meticulously thought out beforehand. The opposite is true. A small thumbnail sketch...is usually all that precedes putting brush to canvas. At that point some "thing" has excited my libido visually and I'm off.

   Eventually a dialogue develops between me and the image, which grows and changes in response to what's inside my head.

*The Artist's Statement was exerpted from On Alternate Days, The Paintings of Nancy Witt (Ashland, Virginia: Cross Mill Gallery, 1995)