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Nancy fell in love while driving through the seaside villages along New England’s Atlantic coast. It was in Marblehead, Massachusetts, to be exact. She glanced up to see a young woman riding a bicycle, her hair pulled back, her wicker bicycle basket spilling over with fresh wildflowers. “It was heavenly,” she says. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind.” And so it was that the simplicity of New England’s past
made its way into Nancy’s life, and art.
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Artist Nancy Thomas feels a special connection with seaboard sites and colonial history. The subjects are often united in her work, as they are in this print celebrating Yorktown, the place where she lives and where she finds material for her imagination |
Today, in her home in downtown Yorktown, Virginia, Nancy is surrounded by that very New England nuance that sparked her creative career. Furnished with eighteenth-century pieces—an American pine highboy, a primitive desk from Maine, a Connecticut-made Hoadley grandfather clock—
her home and adjacent studio reflect that quiet impression made on her so long ago.
Art was never far from her consciousness. As a child, she designed comic strips peopled by her favorite imaginary characters, Lettucie and Carrotie, engaged in lively conversation. |
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Fat Rabbit
The first of the Kindred Spirits collection. A collaboration between Nancy Thomas and
Claire Murray |
While other girls were at camp or on vacation, she would sit quietly at home and sketch. When World War II ended, her father was commissioned by the U.S. government to help rebuild the city of Berlin. Nancy, then nine, her mother, and brother accompanied him. It was a dark and terrible time, with the city nothing more than a mass of rubble and destruction.
To occupy the children, Nancy’s mother set up a card table in the
bedroom of their home and brought out modeling clay and other creative playthings to keep the children busy. “We stayed in that small room every day, all day, building cities and roads, cars with people driving them, houses with furniture in each room. I believe
this is where my keen focus on creating art was born.” In 1948, as
the Russians surrounded Berlin in an attempt to blockade railroad and
street access so they could better control parts of the city, it
became clear that Nancy and her family were not safe. They were
airlifted by British and American pilots and returned to Richmond.
Continued in the Fall, 2008 issue of
La Vie Claire magazine. Subscribe
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