Paintings - Nancy Petry RCA

Early Works 1950 -1969

Works 1960 -1961

Rivers 1969 – 1971

Nancy Petry’s Arcadia is a magical realm where rivers flow like ribbons on the wind and where nature’s colours are held between the folds of paper plains. It is a landscape of imagination, beauty and order and it raises the question: Is Arcadia just a symbol of our desire for a better world?

Inspired by the northern indigenous territories seen while flying to Europe Petry absorbed their delineating marks into her Rivers series created between 1969 and 1971.

Each work’s pictorial essence focuses on a specific river identified by its aboriginal name–Aklavik, Atikonak, Yakima, Inuvik, and so on.

The works are devoid of human habitation, flora, fauna, the time of day, allowing Petry to remake the land into a projection of her identity with abstraction, line and colour.

To quote Petry …

I am mainly interested in colour: bright, marvellous, luminous colours.

Her colours flow, the rivers emerge into the purity of the land she envisions but also the work intuits that within the colours is a forewarning of the harsh environmental changes that have impacted the North.

Joyce Ryckman, “Nancy Petry : Arcadia” VIE DES ARTS, MAY 11, 2016

Islands

Mountains

Light Sightings

Windward Series

Les Naïades

Peregrinations 1994 – 1996

Peregrinations – Sapounakeika 1995

Sacred Sites of the Khmer

1998 – 2002, Cambodia

Inspired by journeys to Cambodia, I use sketches, travel notes and photographs to explore the memory of landscape in Sacred Sites of the Khmer. Revealed to me is the vital yet elusive essence of place. Ancient cities and temples hidden in the jungle Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm and Banteay Srei are magical sites that have re-emerged through the vines and trees. Silent and mysterious, they are witness to a thousand years of dreams and memories that infuse and transform the recognizable into a reality alluding to the past, present and future.
Nancy Petry, June 30, 2000 (find more at COLLECTIONS CANADA)

Fragments Unfolding

“For several decades Petry has continued to explore the boundaries of abstraction and in the series Fragments Unfolding she frees the work from traditional considerations by placing various elements of landscape within origami-like structures, fold follows fold and the image shifts revealing the land as a brilliantly coloured relief, a three dimensional cartography of coloured marks inviting the viewer to enter the work and explore its geography.

Starting in 2002 and continuing to the present, each work in this series is autonomous but when grouped has the effect of soaring across the walls.”