Elissa Collopy
eac001@marietta.edu
Nancy Manter, a painter and photographer who focuses on weather, came to campus Thursday, Feb. 19. Manter spoke about her art and a three-day workshop she is currently teaching in an intermediate-to-advanced painting class on campus.
“It was nice spending time with her during classes because you really got to see how she works,” senior Kat Norton, one of Manter’s students, said. “She’d start dancing around and just start painting without thinking about it and follow her emotions—she seems to be an instinctive person in her work, which I admire.”
Manter grew up in a small town in Maine of around 1,500 people where her parents’ main focus was the weather.
“We got all kinds of extreme weather—inclement weather, 50 below zero with wind chill, or we would have some tremendous rainstorms,” Manter said. “[My parents] were probably the first environmentalists.”
She said this had a primal effect in terms of the work that she creates.
“I’m not really a landscape painter, per se, but I always worked from the landscape, in the landscape,” she said.
Manter came to the conclusion that she was a weather-chaser who did a lot of work from her car, using the windshield as a painting pallet where there was a visible foreground, middle ground and background, to which she then eliminated the middle ground.
“The contrast is really an important piece in my work,” she said. “Tension and this theme of working with this veil happens throughout a lot of the work that I’ve done.”
Her exhibit, now open in Gallery 310 in the Hermann Fine Arts Center, touches on different weather patterns in Marietta. Manter’s three-day workshop also produced student pieces that are in this exhibition.
“She taught us how to make lines and create art from that, like in her pieces she’s created and that were shown during her presentation,” Norton said.
During her presentation, Manter mentions this type of artwork. The first piece she showed was a photograph from the inside of her car, where the window was visible with dew and finger marks she had done to create a veil.
After a handful of car shots, she moved on to photos in New York and her apartment on the 48th floor in the tallest building in Brooklyn, where she had a sight of the river.
“I became really involved with what was happening with the sky and what was happening with the water, and how this manmade landscape worked with all these different weather elements,” Manter said.
She then introduced shots of landscapes in Wyoming and weather that occurred there, all while describing her interest in wind patterns and maps.
“She researches weather patterns before a project and is really into wind patterns which she uses in her pieces,” Norton said.
Manter said the weather is what drives her to create new pieces.
“She always said that anything you create and consider being art, is art,” Norton said.
Manter’s artwork, as well as the students’ artwork, is able to be seen in Gallery 310 from now until April 3.
