Lamorinda Arts Alliance

Nancy Vachani

https://www.instagram.com/vachaniart/
I was born in Massachusetts in a suburb of Boston. I was not exposed to any art outside of regular in class elementary school art. My family moved to a suburb of Chicago where my mom enrolled me in a local art teacher’s Saturday morning class. The teacher suggested that I would enjoy the Art Institute of Chicago summer classes. Those were wonderful classes not so much for the teaching, but the free admission to the Institute Museum of fine art. My friend and I would wander the corridors of the museum after enjoying our bag lunch seated next to the lions on the entry steps.
As a youth I always enjoyed drawing and painting exotic figures from stories or books I had read. There was an abundance of Bedouin tribal people and Africans. It was a good way to learn to do portraits from a variety of racial and ethnic groups.
I attended the University of California Berkeley campus where I majored in Asian Studies. During the college years, I met and married my husband who is from India. We traveled extensively together and lived one year in India.
It was only after graduation that I realized how much I missed the arts. I engaged in the arts once again with drawing, print making and painting sporatically through the years while raising a family. For several years I did commissioned portraiture including pet portraits.
At present I am fully engaged in drawing and painting in my studio located in Orinda.

Artist's Statement

My portfolio contains many paintings and drawings in the realist tradition representing a multitude of genre- portraiture, still life, narrative figurative, and landscape.

A great narrative has always triggered my imagination and is reflected in many of my works. The stories come from. a multitude of sources- news, books, films, personal accounts and just life itself with all its triumphs and tragedies. Thus, I frequently employ narratives in my paintings. I was overjoyed when the DeYoung Museum Open 2020 exhibition included two of my paintings. That inclusion validated what I had hoped for, a narrative that viewers could relate to on some level and be moved by it.

My preferred painting medium is oils with occasional works in casein or encaustic paint. Stylistically my work is defined as contemporary realism and narrative figurative. Recently, I have done more landscape painting which allows me to explore even more of the challenges of those mediums.

Although I am primarily self-taught, I’m passionate about my art and
enjoy the precise methods and tools needed to achieve realistic results.
Focusing on details is an important part of my growth process as an artist. My color choices range from classic subdued and subtle to bright hues depending on the subject and narrative. I have enjoyed grinding and tubing my own paints to better understand their unique properties and historical significance.

I work simultaneously on various themes including our fragile existence and mortality. These themes are expressed either in a close up of one individual or a wider narrative based on contemporary themes such as feminism, religion, and today’s sociopolitical challenges as well as the intersection of technology. These themes are also reflected in my still life paintings. My hope is that the stories in the paintings will convey our common humanity. The paintings are about the universal message of compassion in a troubled world as well as its tranquil beauty with the hope that the viewer is moved out of complacency.