Nan Hockenbury

As a young learner, Nan Hockenbury was captivated by the spare and colorful illustrations of Dick, Jane, and Sally in her elementary school reader. The bold black type on simple white pages enhanced her desire to color and draw instead of doing schoolwork. She is sure this was the foundation of her becoming an artist.

Through a series of sequential canvases, Hockenbury narrates researched stories and myths, differing opinions of history, and her own point of view. She has presented creation stories from the Greeks (Eurynome), Egyptians (Hathor, Sekhmet, and Ati), Norse (Freya), Aborigines (Rainbow Serpent), and Iroquois (Sky Woman). To counter the violent masculine drama of myth, she uses non-figurative images that glorify the heroine/goddess/creator as a powerful female force.

In another narrative series, characters called Nonomonies create their own myth. Their tales contain the question of truth vs. story—what is to be believed or not believed, real or unreal. The viewer determines what these characters are while in their world. Nonomonies are organic, living creatures that move, flow, scramble, follow, befriend, confront, and disappear, yet they remain as one-dimensional as a brightly colored flat plastic form.

Hockenbury’s work as a plein-air artist had long been a struggle of self-doubt until she encountered a publication of work by Marsden Hartley created in Dogtown, Gloucester, MA. Seeing this work, she realized that landscape painting does not have to duplicate reality. With this permission, she gained the self-confidence to record her surroundings in her own way. She now describes the scene using color and arrangement to express her personal experience. Whether painting on the beach while listening to the tide, standing at the top of a small island, or in a garden landscape, in warm sunshine or a cold wind, she finds that nature rewards the plein-air artist for the effort.