Nancy Whitcomb

Nancy Spears Whitcomb, a painter, illustrator, graphic designer and teacher, graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in the '70s and completed a year in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, in New York. Besides Providence, she has lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Paris. She has illustrated books, magazines, newsletters and record covers.

She has shown at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, RISD'S Woods Gerry Gallery, Providence Art Club galleries and other East Coast galleries. She teaches art to children in an inner-city school and is a part-time children's librarian at the Providence Athenaeum.

She is most interested in the push and pull of the surface of a picture, working on busy images that seem to move, but are also frozen in time. She can't let go of imagery of the past, souvenirs of the mind, and wants to capture them in a new way. And she likes visual puns.

She much enjoys playing with the visual effects of people in groups, among other things to evoke sometimes bizarre social conformity, or to suggest an individual's desire to break from a group. And these groups and individuals are often going somewhere -- if only in circles. She plays off historical themes, as well as off high art and current popular culture, including advertising and news events, to create ironical images, sometimes with even more humor just under the surface, and sometimes with a bit of menace.

Much of her work could be called playful, though there's often a subtext of social observation, with a cool gaze at the surreal world around her.