NANCY KEMBRY

Kembry's still life paintings focus on the expressive and abstract qualities of colour and formal composition in both an historical and a contemporary context. Although influenced by the still lfe work of French artists Chardin (1689-1779) and Cezanne (1839-1906, and the Italizan painter Morandi (1890-1964), Kembry draws on abstract/representational forms common to our everyday life. In keeping with the spirit of these artists, her large scale oil paintings are characterized by somber colours and a meditative mood, and are stripped bare of decorative elements, extraneous detail, and moralizaing content. While attempting to create a classical three-dimensional illusion on canvas, she also integrates real objects into the two dimensional surface, such as combinations of cement, clay, wood, plaster, bolts, and screws.

For the artist, still life embodies both the spiritual world and the physical ephemeral qualities of life and death. Combined with the use of three-dimensional objects, and historical and contemporaty influences, her work expresses the simultaneous co-exitence of the past and the present, illusion, and reality, and the physical and the spiritual.

Born in Vancouver British Columbia in 1952, Nancy Kembry obtained her Bachlors of Fine Art from York University in 1983.

Still Life with Pear #80       Oil on Canvas 16 x 12 inches 1999