Portals

Alone in her studio, Nancy Witt paints a seascape when she needs inspiration. For Witt, the line where the sea meets the sky provides a portal to the subconscious mind.

Once she gains access, she prefers to be alone.

“If I want to drift off somewhere but still be holding the brush, I don’t want to have to explain that … . You enter another world.”

Witt’s work is at once hyper-realistic and dreamlike, forming a complex psychological landscape. Though her paintings evoke surrealists like Salvador Dali and René Magritte, she prefers to think of herself as a “meta-realist,” a word that suggests inhabiting two worlds at once.

“We live in two kinds of reality,” she explains in her artist’s statement.

“The most familiar is exterior, such as tables and trees. The other is interior and includes such things as dreams, both day and night. My paintings address the experience of living in both worlds simultaneously.”

Beginning Friday, the Ashland-based artist will exhibit her work at Rivermont Studio, along with raku ceramics by her son, David Camden. She was an early influence on John Morgan, a Sweet Briar College art professor who owns the studio.

“I think Nancy is a very brave artist. She has made her own way all these years,” Morgan says. “Until we get to the mid-70s, ’80s and ’90s, it was very difficult for women to make a living in the fine arts.”

Witt is 78, and over the years, she has earned a national reputation, showing her work in galleries from New York City to Los Angeles. She is named in several who’s who listings and is the subject of an independent film, “Vanishing Point.”

Sometimes, she has been cast in a light different from that which illuminated her male counterparts, such as the time a Richmond art critic characterized her as “one of the best female artists in Virginia.”

“Have you ever heard of anyone referred to as a man artist? It was a subtle thing but really kind of devastating,” she says during a phone interview.

A minister’s daughter, Witt spent several formative years in Lynchburg, attending the Frank Roane School and later Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.

After one year at Randolph-Macon, Witt transferred to art school at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University). Though her stay at Randolph-Macon was brief, her feelings toward the college are raw today, especially toward the decision to sell four paintings from the permanent collection.

“I don’t know that college,” she says. “The fact that they sold those paintings was just the straw the broke the camel’s back, as far as I’m concerned.”
Today, Witt lives in a former gristmill outside Ashland.

When she bought the building in 1965, the floor was scattered with animal carcasses, there were no windows, and parts of the structure were falling apart. But the vast amount of space was perfect for an artist.

Witt transformed the mill over fives years. Today, it functions as her studio, living quarters and a gallery.

It was at the gristmill during the early ’70s that Morgan began a lifelong friendship with Witt. Morgan had just finished graduate school at VCU.

“I was broke, and she made the best homemade beer,” he says.

The two spent hours talking about art. He considers her influence on him to have been profound.

“I really floundered for a while. Just the conversations — she might not even remember — but they had a big impression on me finding my own voice,” he says.
Morgan was struck by Witt’s work ethic. For decades, her routine from Monday through Friday has been to spend a full day — eight hours or more — in the studio.

Art has always been Witt’s north star. She considers painting as vital as eating and sleeping.

“I’ve never had any doubt about what I’m supposed to be doing. I remember painting watercolors with my mother when I was five or six, and I’ve been at it ever since.

“I feel very fortunate in that respect; I’ve never had any doubt.”

Witt was married twice and has three sons. Balancing family and work was a challenge. She learned to make time for her art while tending to her children’s needs. “You can change diapers and then go paint, but if you change diapers and then make the bed, you never get around to painting. So I don’t make beds,” she says with a chuckle.

All of her sons became artists, including Camden, with whom she will be showing work at Rivermont Studio. Camden admires his mother’s intense commitment to her art.

“She works like nobody’s business. You don’t mess with her between 9 and 5 in the studio,” he says.

As Witt ages, her body betrays her at times. Every day, she endures the pain of severe arthritis in her legs. The only time the pain lifts, she says, is when she paints.

Her friends have said she has a “masterpiece complex.” She says she’s always trying to produce better work, to explore uncharted territory.

Whether she ever paints that masterpiece, she long ago fulfilled her idea of success.

“I define successful as the ability to provide for your own needs and live life as you want. Making more money than that becomes burdensome and an end in itself. A dead end,” she writes in her book, “On Alternate Days: Paintings by Nancy Witt Book II.”

Far from a dead end, Witt’s path, it seems, has led her to that faint line where the sea meets the horizon.

The First Friday exhibition reception will run from 6 to 8 p.m. at Rivermont Studio, 1204 Rivermont Ave. Nancy Witt and David Camden will give an artist’s talk at 11 a.m. on Saturday.