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On the Art of Nancy Storrow
Visual artists are poets, too.
Some more than others, depending on the reason for the art.
Nancy Storrow, a visual artist, is a poet.
It’s striking how she is.
Her drawings seem to have no boundaries.
She is in nature.
She sweeps across the Vermont fields, moving from stalk to stalk in a choreography of drawing, setting her pastel line down with grace but with intensity and acuity on a surface we call paper but is in fact a breeze that is present enough to carry her mark.
The mark makes a strand of plant in order for us to understand it.
It allows us to follow her and hear the rustle.
We are there, too, with her.
— John Tomlinson, artist. 2017
The Forest for the Leaves
“I have had a longtime affair with natural forms,” says Vermont-based artist Nancy Storrow. “This past year, I fell in love with huge windblown leaves. I began drawing them—re-shaping, distorting them.”
In her recent series, Fragile, she takes the leaves on the forest floor and transforms them into drawings featuring bright, loose, abstract shapes. Her interest in foliage springs from the interplay of nature’s opposites—how fallen leaves signify the presence of life while also portending its inevitable decay. “Fragile captures that edge of physical deterioration and balances it with regeneration and growth,” she says. “And there is a bright, beautiful core of toughness in the remnants.”
Storrow begins each drawing by marking a single line on paper. She suggests the characteristics of each leaf with pastel lines, sometimes using her fingers to smudge and add texture. The result is a transcendent metamorphosis, and a unique, ephemeral portrait. “In all the tenuousness of life, the leaves are what is left and what will return,” she says. “I want to mirror this in my drawings.”
— By Noelani Kirschner | May 3, 2021, The American Scholar
On viewing Nancy Storrow's Drawings
Rain falls. An erasure is made.
Four lines bend as threads upward.
Wavering in inaudible sounds.
A thicket leans, splays, closes its
density. No horizon here. Only
conversation. The air hums
from whence to where.
Eyes move to an upper window.
An owl passes in slow motion
her heart flies beyond any rim.
Pencils slip from fingers no longer
hers, fall into nothingness.
Spaces widen, await.
In her hand a pod is held day
after day. On an August morning
it relinquishes its colors. She
dips, cannot stop, respects and
keeps the emptied pod. A concrete
form moves on its shelf. What was
in shadow, voices from whence, to here.
— Ann Stokes, 1995