Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Nancy Albrecht

We saw some of Nancy Albrecht’s recent plein air paintings in New American Paintings book #77 Midwest Open Studios Press. Here is what Robert Kameczura, Chicago art critic has to say about this urban plein air artist:

"Nancy Albrecht’s recent paintings represent something of the duality of Chicago’s personality. On the one hand the city is earthy, seemingly rough, massive and jumbled, on the other side Albrecht sees the city representing the acting out of the cycle of life, the eternal pattern of birth, death and rebirth.

Her paintings show a Chicago that is made out of tough steel and stone, in neighborhoods which include heavy buildings, El platforms, streets and alleys, with a particular emphasis on things which are being torn down for reconstruction. She takes a certain delight in the bizarre shapes and counterpoints of urban structures. Her Chicago views are all painted in a raw painterly style, done almost exclusively with palette knives, laid on in thick textured layers with small touches of lyrical bright color to enliven the scene…

“Albrecht’s Chicago paintings, with their strong geometry, bold paint surfaces, lyric details, and optimistic strength, seem very much in line with Carl Sandburg’s mythical image of Chicago as ‘…cunning as a savage, pitted against the wilderness, bareheaded, shoveling, wrecking, planning, building, breaking, rebuilding.’”

Robert Kameczura
Arts Writer and Critic
Big Shoulders’ Magazine, Chicago Artists’ News, and etc
January 10, 2007"

You can see Nancy's blog here:

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