Nancy Gruskin, painter, collage artist, teacher
Transitioning to an artistic career, her best-selling workshops, why she doesn’t do studies, and a banana painting I really like
I’ve admired Nancy Gruskin’s paintings since I saw her still lifes of children tying shoes and scenes of families seated around dinner tables of food. I liked her large brush strokes, how she simplified what could be visually busy subjects, her unapologetic use of bright and sometimes pure primary colors, and her decisions about what is and isn’t in view. There is often part of a dog in her scenes, adding to their appeal (at least for me). Nancy continues to paint simplified scenes of everyday life, and also works in collage and paper mache.
Art has been a thread throughout Nancy’s life. She was an art history major and studio art minor and then went on to earn a master’s and PhD in art history, focusing on modern architecture. She has taught college-level art history classes, but discovered the job market for tenure track positions was bleak. So, she went to law school and became a lawyer. While working as a lawyer, she nonetheless continued with her art and ultimately decided to make art her full-time focus. Here’s our recent conversation.
Your work life has taken some twists and turns, including teaching art history courses, working as a lawyer, and then deciding you wanted to focus on painting. When did you pick up painting again?
I never really stopped. Even in grad school I would take painting classes to keep up my skills. I didn't have a lot of time. When my husband, son, and I moved to Concord, I was practicing law, but found time to join a Thursday morning group with a live model and I would paint or draw for an hour. It was a way to do something I loved but didn’t have a lot of time to do. I took a painting class with Emily Passman and then began painting more when my son went to kindergarten.
I realized I wanted to stop practicing law and focus on painting. I didn't quite know how I was going to do it. At the time, I was doing appellate work, representing indigent defendants. The work was important, but stressful, and I found it particularly challenging to be an effective attorney part-time, as I was the primary caregiver for our son. The fact that I’d been working part-time with a very modest income just made the decision to retire from practice a bit less “high stakes.” I remember saying to my husband, I just don't want to practice law anymore. I've got to paint.
What did you do at that point?
I did a painting demonstration at Concord Art, and that led to an offer to teach, which led to many more teaching opportunities. It worked out. [Her workshops sell out fast.]
Tell me about your classes, which are quite popular.
Early in the pandemic I figured out how to teach art online. I usually start classes with a slide presentation of the work of other artists; works that inspired or are otherwise related to the exercises for the day. Then we do open-ended exercises with prompts that give students many possible directions to go. Students like the open-ended aspect of it.
My classes are not about teaching techniques or methods. They’re really about getting students out of their routines. I try to introduce processes or materials that get students thinking outside the box. For example, we might make 3D objects out of cardboard, based on forms we see in our 2D collages, or vice versa. Often, the exercises come out of whatever is going on in my own studio.
My approach is to experiment, have fun, and play. If it’s not fun, what's the point?
Do you have an art routine for yourself?
I don't. One of the joys of having a studio in the house is that it's always there, so I don't feel the need to keep rigid hours. There’s definitely a seasonal aspect to it. Summer is more relaxed and I’m doing mostly paper collages right now. In September, I'll start working on paintings again.
You mentioned collage. What is exciting you about that right now?
I'm doing it in a way that I haven't before. In the past, I worked with ready-made, solid-colored papers such as Color-aid paper or colored pastel paper or hand-painted paper.
Then I did this exercise in a class I taught at Concord Art. We created still life arrangements out of objects we made with paper mache. Then, we did an exercise in which students made a painting of their still life arrangement, and then cut that painting up to use it as collage paper. [I think I need a flow chart for this!]
I fell in love with that process, and I’ve been making paintings on paper that I then use as collage paper. I have trouble articulating why it's so exciting to me. I think it's because it's like recomposing a painting. What I love about collage is having these pieces to play with. It's like a puzzle. There's also something about having subject matter on the paintings and then cutting them in a way that takes away that subject matter, making it invisible, that I find really exciting.
Tell me about your show earlier this year, The Shape of Things.
Becky Street, a printmaker in Seattle, invited me to collaborate on a show. At the time our work seemed to have a lot of connections. Her work is very shape-driven. I had been playing with colored paper and making collages, and we were looking at each other's work on Instagram. It felt like we were on these parallel tracks. There were always connections between our work, but it felt like, at this particular juncture, we were really in each other's heads.
Becky’s focus was printmaking and mine was collage. For one wall in the gallery, she made basically a wallpaper of print monotypes and of vessels that were recurring in her work. I made ceramic slab vessels—glazed with different colors on top—of the same shape and we hung those on top of her prints.
Looking at your paintings over time, do you think you are moving in a more abstract direction?
I struggle with that question because I love lots of different things, from object-based, representational work to art that's more abstract.
The way I think about it is that it is all shape, color, and pattern. There are recognizable objects, even in the really abstract work.
But I know to an outside observer, my work appears decidedly more abstract. The most difficult part of doing this professionally is that galleries and buyers like what they like. I don't want to stay in one place just because there's a particular buyer or a gallery that likes what I’m doing at that moment and doesn’t want me to change.
At the moment, I don't want to set up and paint a still life arrangement. There are little moments that I keep in my head, rather than quickly making a drawing or taking a photograph of it, so my work is getting a little more abstract. But I never rule out going back to the figure or going back to that certain subject matter.
Much of your art is autobiographical, and you’ve painted many objects in your house, such as your table with food. Do you view life through a lens of what would make a good painting?
Absolutely. When I walked into your house and saw your cat on the desk next to a vase of sunflowers, I thought that was an interesting image. So, I just bank it away. [I thought the cat was going to knock a vase of flowers off the desk, so I had a different reaction, but now I hope Nancy does paint my cat Graymo.]
Tell me about your process for painting.
It varies because, sometimes, I want to look at something and draw or paint it. But other times, I don’t need to look at an object because I’ve painted it many times. Sometimes I'll have an idea for a particular object I'm thinking about, so it’s an abstraction of a memory, I suppose. Or maybe it's a mood, or a color palette that I'm thinking about.
Then I just start painting. I don't make preliminary sketches or drawings because I feel like if I do that, then I'll get it out of my system, and it won't be exciting enough to paint anymore.
Do you work on more than one painting at a time?
I don't. I’m thinking of trying to do that this fall as a test to see if there was some great value that I'm missing by not doing it.
What are your favorite studio materials?
I love acrylic gouache. It dries with a very matte velvety finish, and it is opaque no matter what color you use. The addition of acrylic binder gives it a little bit of permanence so that if you layer color, the lower layers don’t lift up and muddy the top layers (which is a problem with traditional gouache). It’s forgiving and I like the way it looks on paper and on panels. I will varnish paintings because the gouache is not truly waterproof. It’s also affordable because it’s made with modern pigments.
Flashe, which is a water-based vinyl paint, also has a nice matte finish and is fairly opaque. I use that on occasion as well, although I prefer the acrylic gouache because the colors mix very cleanly.
Tell me about your series called Invented Vessels.
Those paintings sprung from my habit of inventing still life arrangements and borrowing moments from other paintings and collages of mine. The series also came from my interest in ceramics. When the pandemic started, I had signed up for my first ceramics class and the ceramics studio closed, so I started making paper mache vessels instead. Eventually the ceramics studio reopened and I started to throw and hand build vessels in clay. Sometimes, vessels I make in the ceramics studio show up in the paintings and sometimes I try to make vessels from the paintings in clay.
Working with paper-mache sounds fun.
It is fun! A lot of the exercises in my classes are things that I could easily do with kindergarteners. We should do it more. There's great work being done with paper-mache!
Are there any art forms or mediums that you haven't played around with that you want to explore?
I'd like to do more printmaking. Also, ever since I first saw David Hockney's paper pulp paintings, I’ve wanted to try that process. The technique is similar in some ways to making a stained glass composition. You make metal forms for the different sections, pour dyed paper pulp into the section where you want it, drain the water out, let it dry, remove the forms, and you have a painting made out of hand-dyed paper pulp.
One of my favorite paintings is your Self-Portrait with Bananas. How did that one come about?
Well, everybody's work is really a self-portrait, whether they're pictured in it or not. I was doing figurative work a lot back then. At the time, I had started painting full time and my son was young [he’s 17 now]. He was natural subject matter because he was always doing these amazing poses, just naturally.
There’s one painting of him tying his cleats for a soccer game. I saw him looking like an ancient Roman sculpture sitting there. It just begged to be painted. [Nancy’s son was the subject of many paintings for a while.]
That painting came at a time when I was thinking about family and domestic life. I was gaining my physical independence and headspace as my son became more independent. I think I turned away from what was going on with him and started to be more in my own head. Right now, I’m really interested in objects and pushing the boundaries of what a still life painting can be, but the figure may return.
I admire the originality of your work and its economy of detail. I think you’ve found a sweet spot between representational and abstract. How did you get there?
I'm glad you see it that way because that's where I want to be.
I’m drawn to other people's work that’s grounded in life and yet abstract enough that it's open to interpretation.
I used to set up a still life arrangement or look at a photo, but then I would feel like I owed it to that image to represent it. When I stopped doing that and started working more from memory or invention, that freed me.
Food has appeared in many of your paintings. Do you like to cook?
Yes, I cook quite a bit. I am not a good improviser. I have The New York Times cooking app, and that's my go to. [Interesting how her free form approach to artmaking doesn’t carry over to cooking.]
What's the best advice that you received about making art?
I tend to hem and haw about the direction my work's going in, thinking there's no consistency. My friend Maureen [Nathan] says, “it's all coming from the same head, same hands. It's you. Don’t think about how it’s going to be received. Just make the work.”
What advice do you have about making art besides just keep making it?
I see a lot of students who take so many classes and they have so many voices in their heads. There’s a well-known Philip Guston quote [When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you— your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out.] Finding a way to let all of those voices go is important. Taking classes can be helpful, but I think there's a point where you just have to be on your own and see where that takes you.
How do you quiet those voices?
By putting in the time. Instagram is a blessing in many ways, but that makes it hard too, seeing all this work by others. It can be intimidating and make one ask, why aren't I doing work like that?
If you could trade a piece of art with another artist, what artists would you pick?
Elizabeth Blackadder. She just passed away and there’s a big retrospective of her work in Edinburgh now. I would take any of her paintings. I also admire the work of Janice Biala and Aubrey Levinthal.
Do you remember the first painting that you ever sold?
It was probably to my mother or my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law’s house is a whole retrospective from my early paintings to my most recent collage from this summer. Many are images of her kids and my son and family.
If you could go anywhere to make art for a month, where would you go?
I would do a residency at the Woodman Family Foundation. Betty Woodman was a ceramicist, her husband George Woodman was a painter, and their daughter Francesca was a photographer. [Interesting side note that my late mother-in-law grew up with Betty Woodman.] They would spend time at a house in Tuscany, and their foundation has an artist residency there. It would be amazing to be in the actual studios and house where they lived and worked.
If you could observe any artist working, who would you choose?
I’d like to see Matisse, in his later years, making the cut-outs. I've always thought of them as collage, but when we were looking at them during a class I taught this spring, I realized they were meant to be immersive installation pieces. The cut-outs were loosely tacked to the wall, a breeze would come in, and they would flutter. Matisse designed a swimming pool [he and his assistant transformed a hotel room into a swimming pool with cut-outs bordering the room like pool tiles], and his studio became the canvas for these cut-outs.
Lightning round questions
Most memorable meal. During a family vacation in Tuscany, the owner of the house in which we stayed cooked a meal for us. We sat outside overlooking a vineyard. I remember the prosciutto and melon, unbelievable Pecorino cheese, and tiramisu.
Favorite piece of art that you own. For sentimental and aesthetic reasons, a painting my grandmother made of huarache sandals.
Do you have a painting of yours that you won’t sell? The first painting I made that had my son in it. He and the dog are standing in the kitchen.
You're hosting a dinner party for six people living or dead. Who is coming and what are you serving? I’d invite my parents and my husband’s parents (all now deceased), Matisse, Picasso, and Elizabeth Blackadder.
I would serve a pasta dish with lemon zest and asparagus or peas, a big green salad, and my go-to crowd pleaser—Ina Garten’s Beatty’s chocolate cake. It’s the best!
Most captivating museum visit. I love the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Picasso Museum in Paris.
Palate & Palette menu
Here’s what I will serve if Nancy and her husband come to dinner, which they are invited to do:
Golden beet, burrata, and green leaf lettuce salad with herb vinaigrette
Soba noodle otsu (one of my favorite recipes of all time)
Caramelized banana upside-down cake
Inspiring approach to being an artist and thinking outside the box. I can imagine that the classes Nancy teaches are fun and challenging. Thanks, Amy!