My name is Nancy Bien. I am a California artist and a cello player.
My life as a painter began in music. For all of my adult life I’ve made a living as a cellist – working my way through college to an MA in performance, followed by few years playing in a symphony orchestra on the east coast, finally coming home to California. I have been an active freelance musician in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.
Through all the years of music study and performing, all of my life really, I spent hours drawing all kinds of invented characters. It was a meditative and personal practice that helped to balance out the intense demands of music study, and was a balm to the stresses of on-stage professional life. I always longed for opportunity and time to do more of it. When my youngest son began school, I finally had the chance. I signed up for a drawing class. A spark was lit, and it flared… A few years later I took a painting class. That class changed my life forever.
Over time, I leaned more deeply into the refuge I’d found in painting. As my paintings became more personal, doing this work became more essential to me. I gravitated to painting female figures that have come to represent a kind of ongoing narrative about being a woman in the world today. Each one of these figures has taught me more about making paintings, and more about myself.
During the COVID19 lockdown I began making abstract paintings alongside the figurative work. I don’t know if this signals a change in direction, or an expansion of the path I’ve been on for so many years. All I know is that it’s new for me, and it’s exciting.
Artist Statement
I am a Californian. I love this place of incomparable natural beauty, inspiring and vibrant, where almost anything is possible. When I paint, all those feelings intensify. I exist in the moment – the canvas, the paint, and me. This is especially true at the beginning of a painting, when nothing has been defined and possibilities are wide open. As a painting develops, it always teaches me more about painting, and also about myself. The act of painting is about challenge and discovery. The destination is a mystery at the beginning that reveals itself along the way. Even when I think I know where I’m going from the start, I never really do. It is always surprising and exciting.
I make paintings to connect with people, to communicate things I can’t say with words, to touch someone’s heart. Painting the human form fascinates me because the subject and shapes are at once intimately familiar to everyone, definitively human, yet unique to each of us.
In 2020 I began making abstract paintings as well. No one is more surprised by this than me. I believe this abstract work is also about things that are intimately familiar to people – about feelings, possibilities, and what we have in common. It makes me think about human connection, and how we are, after all, one family.
I paint figures with emotional power, figures that take up space in the world, people who embody a complicated, joyous, heart wrenching, and resilient life. My abstract work is also about these things, but from a different angle. They are paintings about how we feel, how we live, what matters to us. Every painting teaches me something about who I am. I’m learning more all the time.
The work of many of the 20th century Bay Area figurative artists thrilled me long before I began to make paintings – painters like Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Joan Brown, Nathan Oliveira… and many others. Their use of color, shape, atmosphere, and abstraction – all those things vibrate together with descriptive emotional resonance that is deeply moving. Studying their work constantly teaches and inspires me.
I love vibrant color that can sing in harmony or clash in discord. Every painting is an experiment in ways to move paint around on a canvas – everything from tightly controlled paint application to images defined (or hinted at) by uncontrolled drips and smears. I use brushes, scrapers, things that scratch into the paint, as well as hands and arms, squirt bottles, and — you name it.
I usually begin with a plan, but once the painting gets going I follow the paint in a push-pull dialogue that can take days or weeks — I never know for sure. Rarely will a painting end up where I thought it would. Every single day I’m surprised by what happens on the canvas.