Nancy Delgado - Fine Watercolors
Tap on any image below to start my slide show. The works that you see below are currently housed in the gallery and are available for public viewing and/or sale at the Great Little Gallery. You can see more of my works by visiting my website here.
The Artist's Bio
"Art washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life." Pablo Picasso
The Memoirs of an art school dropout: Although this profile may seem long, I feel these details of my life are important. The scenery of my childhood home, the animals who kept my secrets, the feelings of overwhelming beauty, and the DIY attitude I inherited from my mother are what shaped the foundation of who I am, what I love, and the things that still inspire me. So grab yourself a cup of coffee and read on.
Has anyone besides me ever struggled with what they want to be when they grow up? This has been a lifelong search largely because I enjoy a variety of activities, so those kinds of decisions can be difficult. Though I have had a dream job for the past few years ----doing faux finishing on luxury yachts, in other words doing art and getting paid------the winds of change have left me with less creative tasks where the greatest challenge is manhandling very large pieces of lumber.
Nowadays, faux projects are fewer and farther between and I'm not certain how much longer even these will last. As retirement looms more closely on the horizon, getting back to my roots and doing the things I love most have greater and greater appeal! So how did I get to where I currently am?
Early Years
I was born up in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains, and grew up without the benefit of electricity or TV (accept when the generator was on). My siblings were much older than I. Three had left home by the time I was born, and the other two left by the time I was six.
We lived in a valley on a small farm with cows, a couple of horses, dogs, cats and chickens. We had a pretty good sized vegetable garden. Raspberries, loganberries and strawberries were the highlight of every summer. My backyard was a small mountain with babbling brooks and abundant wildlife. I played with the crawdads that lived in the creek that ran by our house.
The nearest neighbors lived two and a half miles away so my friends and playmates were the dogs, cats, horses and cows that I grew up with. There were dilapidated outbuildings scattered throughout the property. Most of them started out that way because they were built with salvaged wood. But they provided shelter for the chickens, and the hay was kept dry. It was a make-do-or-do-without world, and thanks to my moms ingenuity we didn't do without much.
It was Pablo Picasso who said that every child is an artist. I too was an artist and loved my art projects. It was in kindergarten, however, that my gift was realized. I was one of two children chosen, one boy one girl, to do a mural on the wall because of our outstanding 5 year old artistic ability.
From then on I knew I was an artist! What made me stand out in my five-year-old abilities? I was a realist. The dress the girl was wearing looked like it was blowing in the wind and the blades of grass crisscrossed instead of all standing straight up like tin soldiers at attention. I would cut out intricate designs with my dull scissors, and always stayed inside the lines when coloring! Don't anybody scribble on what I had done or you were in big trouble!
All throughout elementary school and high school I drew and did creative projects whenever they presented themselves. At ten years old I sketched a portrait of Abraham Lincoln no one would believe I drew. I also got in trouble for doing my homework in German Blackletter! I was never chosen for the basketball or baseball teams, but was always chosen when there was an art project or something creative, whatever it happened to be.
My brother and sister-in-law gave me a paint by number oil painting kit one Christmas and that catapulted me into the world of color. The Walter Foster books where my art teachers. I had books on drawing people, oil painting, pastels, drawing horses and dogs and trees, among other subjects. I still have those books.
In Jr. High I was allowed to take a portrait class in oil painting from the University of Washington. This was an extension class taught over the summer and it was the first time I painted from a live model. Everything prior to that was copied out of books.
Later, in my high school years, I created acrylic paintings of wildlife on wooden plaques, and I sold them along with commissioned portraits in oil of teachers and other people's children. And, although the smell of the oil paints bothered my mom, she insisted on building a room onto the house with a wall of windows so I would have enough natural light to paint without the smell tormenting her.
