Nancy Petry RCA

Biography

Born in Montreal, Nancy Petry lives and works in Montreal and London, England. She holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree from McGill University, where she studied painting with John Lyman and John Fox. She went on to pursue her studies in Paris with Henri Goetz at l’Académie de la Grande Chaumière; with William Hayter at l’Atelier 17 and with Stanley Jones at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. She also studied at the London Film-makers’Co-operative with Jenny Okun. Nancy Petry has been awarded grants from both the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ministère des affaires culturelles du Québec. Her artistic career has taken her across continents, during the course of which she has explored the major artistic movements, primarily those pertaining to abstract art.

As is the case with many prolific artists, her creations can be classified into distinct periods. While her early work (1948-1958) includes studies in which figuration is dominant, there is already an inclination towards abstraction as seen in the Apollinaire series (1956-1960). Living in London, Paris, Ibiza and Greece between 1960 and 1974 inspired her to create works with an abstract component – works such as Jazz (1968), Rivers (1969-1971), Islands and Mountains (1971-1974), Light Sightings (1974-1975) and Silver Sands (1979-1982) to which we can associate Windward (1982-1986), a series produced following a visit to the West Indies. Nancy Petry associated performances to some of these pictorial suites, as was the case with Les Naïades (1986-1987) which was projected at Concordia University during a dance performance (1994).

Her travels in India, Nepal, and Southeast Asia were the inspiration for Peregrinations (1988-1996), which was followed by Sacred Sites of the Khmer (1997-2002) and, more recently, Arcadia: Fragments Unfolding (2002-2006) and L’Accent vert (2007).

During her artistic career, Nancy Petry has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries, art centres, and museums, as well as being a key player in prestigious artistic demonstrations and happenings. To conclude, a collection of articles, catalogues and interviews allows us to retrace the rich biography of this multi-talented artist.

The 2008 retrospective at the Musée des beaux-arts de Mont-Saint-Hilaire, gave the public an overview of Nancy’s Petry artistic production. Nancy Petry was one of the first artists to venture into the realm of abstract art in Québec and in Canada, blazing one of the most beautiful trajectories in the course of a spectacular artistic career.

Nancy Petry, 1977, from the cover of “Vehicule Art” January edition.

(Photo by Herb Greer)

Nancy Petry RCA – Artist Statement

My work is about nature. It gives me an amazing palette to work from and is an endless source of ideas inspiring me to use the magnificent colours and intricate shapes of the landscape, the sky, and the clouds traveling across it.  Often I use colour to reflect the time of day and show forms created by the movement of the wind. My paintings are a transformed version of nature in the many places I have visited, a landscape of the mind, placed within a cosmic dimension, abstraction and my innermost feelings.  Nature has also informed my pioneering work in happenings, interventions, performance art and film.

I graduated from McGill University with a BFA then traveled throughout Europe for a year to see all the great works of art only known to me through colour slides.  Visiting the great European museums was an incomparable learning experience – one of the best years of my life.  I returned home, briefly, then went to Paris to live and attend the famous academies that had attracted artists from all over the world.  In Paris my work gradually changed as my interest in abstraction grew:  Giacometti became an early influence leading me away from figuration, then Modigliani when I worked in the studio at the Grande Chaumière.  As I became drawn to abstraction and to anything oriental, Zao Wou Ki emerged as one of my artistic heroes, his work seeming to me a synthesis of oriental and western cultures. Later, in many of my works produced during my very productive three-year sojourn in Ibiza, there are traces of Antoni Tàpies’ influence.

Travel continues to be one of my passions.  I always carry a little sketchbook so I can capture something interesting, either from a train window or that of a plane.  Often these sketches turn into major works: the Greek Island series, the Rivers series, and the Mountains of the Himalayas series, to name a few.

Because travel was so important to my development both as a young woman and as an artist, it has been my longtime goal to create an opportunity for other young artists to have the same enriching experience. In 2015 I established the Nancy Petry Award to be given to an artist in the early stages of their career to travel and experience art in Europe.