When Nancy Standlee isn’t taking an art workshop, traveling, or journaling, she’s collecting and hand-painting paper scraps to create colorful collages that evoke the memories and emotions of her past experiences. Oh, yeah—and in her spare time, she also manages to create acrylic, gouache and watercolor paintings.
Never striving for photographic reproduction, Nancy instead chooses to leave her figurative artwork to the viewer’s imagination, allowing them to come to their own individual conclusions.
The aptly named Uncle Bob’s Goat (can you see the title within the collage below?) depicts a mischievous, yet clearly lovable goat who naturally resides in Texas.
With words found within the collage ranging from “children” to “barn,” it’s fair to say this goat is an old family friend, perhaps with an insatiable appetite for maps, letters or even escaping. No doubt, Uncle Bob’s goat is a welcoming menace to the family.
Let’s turn sharply on a heel and take a look at Minerals and Metals, an abstract acrylic painting featuring rich jewel-toned colors and a thick texture that vies for attention.
While the teals and cream tones remind me of something I would see in Indian pottery or beading, the cadmium hues bring to mind a cave-like setting where mineral deposits are slowly forming into complex, geological works of art. I see this especially in the downward dripping of yellow paint that consumes most of the piece.
To me, this painting and its respective title give a nod to the history of our our planet in its most basic form.
The beauty in Good Coffee, on the other hand, is found in the astonishing depth created just with paper collage and paint. In this collage, a cup of coffee, complete with a few dark drips spilling from the spoon, tells an amazing story.
It’s fascinating to explore every inch of this collage, to find the unique letters, words, patterns and bits of advertisement in the piece. When you put it all together, you see a quaint coffee shop, where one would go to enjoy the morning paper and inextricably, a good cup of joe.
For more of Nancy’s mind-bogging collages, abstract paintings and still lifes, check out her website, or, take a trip with her step-by-step on her blog as she creates her latest work of art.