My work helps me process my experiences and understand myself as a human being living in this time and place. I like to challenge my ideas of reality by reorganizing time and space. My paintings are about the perceptual limitations that make us ghosts to one another.
Artist Statement
I find inspiration in nature. It is at the center of my art practice. I am curious about native species’ systems and how they converge into huge ecosystems in endless cycles of death and regeneration. I wonder what the world looks like to them. Through my work I look through nature’s lens, and that allows me to enlarge my perception of reality and time. My paintings are shifts in perception and investigations into my relationship with nature.
I have always had a sense that there is more to the world than I can see. Visual perception is complex and fluid. It is limited by experiences and culture and light, yet it shapes the way I perceive the world. In order to work outside these bounds I developed a style of working that allows me to explore alternative ways of seeing.
Through my work I question the known. I intuitively create an alternate world where I can let a story evolve about plants and animals and humans that live in Oregon and the habitats that they require. My imagery comes from found objects, memories, sometimes dreams and intuition, and photographs from my travels. I use literal imagery as a kind of lure into the piece where I have reorganized the perspective and shapes into new and unexpected visual relationships. In my earlier work I combined wetland and other wild ecosystems with urban imagery as a metaphor for human culture and development. After the Pandemic experience and with the continuing effects of fire and drought on the landscape, my current work has become even more focused on the water resources that support humans and nature alike.
My paintings give nature a voice. They highlight the beauty and intelligence of our animal and plant systems that we take for granted and barely notice. My work speaks to our human kinship with nature and how we shape each other through time.
Bio
Nancy Watterson Scharf is a visual artist working primarily with acrylic painting media. Her curiosity about the limitations and nuances of perception has led her to explore human experiences from many alternate perspectives. She reorganizes literal imagery in space, thus bringing into question one’s perception of reality. Much of Nancy’s visual language emerges from her life living in the rural areas of the state. She is an avid gardener and she loves to go fishing, birding, hiking and camping.
Nancy is interested in the way nature challenges and shapes human culture over time, and how that struggle influences contemporary perceptions of the non-human world. Nancy studied art at the University of Oregon with a focus on painting and drawing. She earned a BEd in 1971.
Formerly an art instructor in Central Oregon, she now lives in the coast range of Southern Oregon. Nancy began exhibiting in 1999. Since then she has shown her paintings in solo, invitational and juried exhibitions throughout Oregon and Washington. Nancy received The Ford Family Foundation Oregon Visual Artist Residency Award to attend Playa in 2017 and The Oregon Arts Commission selected her work for a solo exhibition at the Oregon Governor's Office in 2020. She was awarded a second residency at Playa in 2024. Her paintings have won many awards and are found in private and public collections including the City of Portland, Southern Oregon University, Mercy Medical Center and Umpqua Community College.