Artist Portrait: by Jim Magner, Hill Rag, June 2009

A Capitol Hill artist and writer, Jim can be reached at Artandthe City05@aol.com

Nancy Donnelly is constantly reaching for meaning as she models and casts each glass sculpture—shaping a vision with her fingers while questioning the purposes as well as the forms that evolve through each step of the process.

Glass is just glass regardless of how pretty it is. It’s imagination wrapped in meaning that turns it into art. It’s the reaching for that meaning that makes the artist.

Glass itself holds much of the mystery. Nancy has to arrive at a mutual destination with the materials, which are both limiting and freeing. She is on a magical mystery tour, discovering the secrets of color as applied to glass: How green glass neutralizes the red hue of copper and lets the gold tints come through. And how painting on the back of the glass reveals the molded images from behind, using the glass surface as a canvas.

This is a natural approach for Nancy who began painting in the mid-90s, attending art schools in Seattle. Holding a PHD in Anthropology, she took a structured approach, studying the craft of painting and the science of color. Five years ago, she took a class at the Washington Glass School…and found her heaven.

Nancy continues to paint—she contributed two panels to fill the window spaces at the Eastern Market after the fi re— but finds glass, even more than painting, a melding of the technical and the emotional. “They have to come together.”

Schools can teach technique and craft, but only the student can supply the content. That is the essence of Nancy’s art: It’s in the reaching for meaning and creating a narrative.

The future for Nancy Donnelly? She is moving to standalone 3-dimensional figures, which are more sculptural— where you can extend your own sensitivities in an exchange with the substance of the figure.

Nancy is showing this month at Artomatic (on the 9th floor, just off the elevators).