Watercolor ArtistNancy Ternasky
2023 Featured Artist
“We are surrounded by bold and delicate, hard and soft, light and heavy in our everyday lives. I was once asked why I decide to put a metal saw blade next to a fragile piece of textured glass. I responded that it was the same reason I love to lift heavy weights and wear high heels. I love the juxtaposition and the contrast. My art is a reflection of how I live my life.”
Nancy Ternasky, a watercolor artist, a lover of the beautiful and the worn, and painter of joy will be the featured artist for the 44th annual Art, for Heaven’s Sake! Fine Arts Festival.
Nancy spent most of her life as very creative whether in the garden, working in interior design or making beautiful wedding invitations. However, there was always more of the artistic she wished to explore.
When she was diagnosed with Stage 4 Breast Cancer and given just a few years to live she felt a new urgency to try painting with watercolors. With a few online classes, a great deal of determination and experimenting, her love of the medium offered up a new way to express herself and a new passion for living.
Nancy paints primarily from photographs at a small table at the end of her kitchen. Her work has become recognizable because she prefers to suspend her subject against the clean white of the paper. Her use of a pastel palette and her delicate style capture the details of found objects, flowers and botanicals, and anything that evokes memories and a sense of nostalgia.
She finds joy in painting minute details one day and the sweeping friendship of loose color mixes the next. She is a lover of nature, and her inspiration comes from her fascination with birds and bird’s nests, the flowers she finds in her garden, sights from her travels, as well as the botanical paintings of early 19th and 20th Century European artists.
Nancy is a former resident of Redlands. She was a Nurse at Redlands Community Hospital and a downtown business owner. Nancy returns to participate in Art, for Heaven’s Sake! from her current home of Lexington, Kentucky, where she is thriving, painting almost daily, and enjoying the company of her granddaughter and affectionate cat, Cali.
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