- April 26, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
from: Michelle Davidson
Gallery and Volunteer Coordinator, Ormond Memorial Art Museum
Nancy Baur Dillen will showcase her nature-inspired, realistic-fantasy oil paintings in Ormond Memorial Art Museum’s pop-up window exhibit at 9 West Granada Blvd., Aug. 3-30. The featured paintings portray her studies of nature that take a detailed and abstracted look inside life within the Smoky Mountains. Mixing her own bright colors using paint medium, dry pigment and burnt plate oil, she creates layers of glazed color that capture light, shadow and unique compositions of nature’s woodland life that we might otherwise fail to notice.
Dillen’s “Overlook” painting pulls the viewer in to look at the beauty of the flowers over the water but leaves the mind to wonder what might be happening elsewhere in the painted scene. Her painting “Blue Ribbon Trail” also takes one into a daydream state of cascading branches, vines, and roots, while a hidden blue ribbon of light guides the way through the painting, marking the trail.
“This painting was conceived from a pastel I did while at Cades Cove, Smoky Mountains, the blue ribbon marks the winning way," Dillen said.
Dillen combines reality and fantasy in her artwork. She says that she has “created magically realistic oil paintings and drawings based on reality and fantasy flipping from one to the other as the spirit hits. My work expresses these flights of fancy in an enchanting way and reflects my intrigue with color and space within the setting. Merging the real, and unreal, the romantic and the dramatic allows me to accept things as they are and to dream and play.”
In the painting “Time Steps,” Dillen’s imagination and tone explores, “life’s pulse as cyclical, moving through seasons, nature’s call, and human steps.” She uses color to mark foliage in changing seasons and imagery of clocks, steps, and vines to portray time, journey and growth. Hidden symbols of faces and animals represent the soul and spirit world.
Currently, Dillen is a full-time professional artist residing in Melbourne. Her love of art came from her education background and 35 years of teaching. As a graduate of Florida State University with a master's in Art Education and Constructive Design, her professional career blossomed into instructing at Brevard Community College. She expanded their art programming, was a guest lecturer, juror, and art consultant nationally and internationally. She now thrives on creating art for public spaces, exhibiting in various art shows, and conducting painting and drawing workshops. Her paintings and drawings are exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Canada and owned by private collectors and permanent collections in the city of Melbourne, Orlando City Hall, Maitland Art Center and Vero Beach Museum of Art to name a few.
To view artwork by Nancy Baur Dillen please visit her website, dillenart.com. Find more information about OMAM’s pop-up window exhibit at ormondartmuseum.org.
