Location: United States
Nancy Satin was born in New York City in 1944, the daughter of parents who owned a restaurant on Madison Avenue. She graduated from Hofstra University with a B.A. in English in February of 1965 and taught English at Long Beach High School until 1969. In 1974, Nancy moved to Swampscott MA, a seaside suburb north of Boston. She studied pottery there and became a professional potter in 1978, winning awards for her whimsical pottery, having solo shows, exhibiting at the Society of Arts & Crafts and being included in the Goodfellow Catalog of Wonderful Things in 1985. Life intruded, and she spent 8 years manufacturing women’s belts in her own company, Fashion Technologies.
When Nancy returned to art, she explored stone carving, sculpture, drawing and then painting at the DeCordova Museum School in Lincoln MA for 10 years. She began her long association with the Acorn Gallery School of Art in Marblehead MA in 1998, where Debra Freeman Highberger started teaching her how to paint in the spring of 1999.
On November 29, 2011, a solo exhibition of 24 of her contemporary oil paintings opened in Palm Beach FL at John DeMedeiros on Worth Avenue. In March of 2012, a still life of hers was included in an exhibition at the Lynn Museum in Lynn MA to celebrate the 115th anniversary of the Museum and Historical Society. In October of 2013, 35 of her paintings were offered for sale in a Pop-up Gallery exhibition at Loft 227 in New York City. By then she had her own website, www.nancysatinart.com, where she continues to publish a blog about her paintings.
In 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019, her work was included in the “Best of the Clubs” exhibits at the Lighthouse Art Center in Tequesta, FL. One of her tango paintings was featured in the juried exhibit of the Salem Arts Festival in June of 2018. Her painting “Rising” won the People’s Choice Award at the Marblehead Arts Festival that July. Since she first participated in their Figurative 2017 Online Art Exhibition, the Light Space & Time Online Gallery has presented her with eight Special Merit Awards and twenty-eight Special Recognition honors for her work in thirty-five of their online exhibitions.
In July and August of 2020, her work was presented in the “Breakout” exhibition at M.A,D.S. Milano, an international digital gallery in Milan, Italy. In October of 2020, fulfilling a strong desire to try to repay the debt she felt she owed to her mentor, Debra Freeman Highberger, who gave her the gift of oil painting, she co-wrote and published PAINTING LESSONS | A Practical Approach to the Philosophy of Painting, a textbook teaching oil painting on Amazon and iBooks.
Owning a condo in Palm Beach Gardens since 2005, she moved to Florida full-time at the end of 2018.
Inspiration strikes in many different ways, and I am often inspired by photographs I see online. I don’t mean that I go trolling for photographs of things I might want to paint; I mean that when I see a photograph that interests me while I’m reading an article or checking notifications on a website, I take a screenshot and save it. In October of last year, I saw a photo of a stained glass torso with an infant in utero that I thought was brilliant.
While I start almost every painting with a monochromatic drawing, my approach to painting this torso was a little different. I began with a simple drawing of her shape, but once I started to draw the flowers covering her breasts, I just set myself free and let my brush travel all over her body to include the leaves and blossoms and color wherever I thought they made sense. My proportions were also slightly different from the original image (she’s taller now…more like me), so I had to correct my version to include more of her body. A bit of a departure from my original inspiration, this was just great fun to paint. I can still see the stained glass in it, but I’m not sure anyone else would.
Artistic license…
I came across a portrait of a dancer and knew I wanted to paint him. I did what I do: chose a big canvas, cropped the image, focused on his upper body and aspirational pose and called the painting Reach. I spent the summer on another couple of paintings but kept being drawn back to that photograph, so I decided to paint the source of his strength…his fulcrum…his lower body.
Until I started the painting, I didn’t realize how blatantly sexual it would be. The very size of the 40” X 40” canvas puts the image in your face. Titles suggested by some of my paint people and my husband included The Package and Red Hot, while a more esoteric friend thought Golden Ratio would work. I settled on Flame for a few reasons: he is red hot, like a flame; a flame is a source of heat; a small flame can set a big fire. Once again, people who passed by my studio and saw me painting him had their own commentary, usually accompanied by snickering. Quite a physical specimen…he should probably be the one snickering.
