We were lucky to catch up with Nancy Brittelle recently and have shared our conversation below.

Nancy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

I started painting in my late 40’s and quickly found some success as a realistic painter. After several years of working in watercolor, acrylic and collage, I increasingly felt the urge to take my work in a new direction, one that reflected my own unique vision. I began this quest by asking myself to reconnect with my earliest creative memories and remembered playing with cardboard as a child, creating environments for my dolls. I began adding cardboard to my collages and became more and more inspired as I built up the surface of my work and explored the possibilities this new material presented.

After several months of exploring this new material, the moment when everything came together took place on a rainy afternoon when I was driving home from town and spotted a cardboard box lying beside the road that was changing shape in the rain. When I arrived home, I found a cardboard box in the garage and put it out on the deck in the rain. After a couple of hours, I brought it back into the studio, reconfigured it and added several more layers of cardboard and some acrylic paint. This would be the first of the over two hundred indoor sculptures I have created, working with cardboard and other disposable paper packaging materials, for the past twenty years. The work is uniquely mine and is just as fresh today as it was on that rainy afternoon.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started painting in my late 40’s when we moved to a new town and took our son off to college. I had always pursued creative activities but never took the plunge of fully immersing myself in any of the projects I had so enjoyed. Finding myself in a new location with a thriving Art Club, I decided to try painting and immediately felt a deep connection. What followed was ten years of taking classes and workshops to learn the basics of painting. During this time, I was asked to begin showing in galleries and had some success while developing a nice following of clients and patrons. After some time, my work took the new direction of working with repurposed paper packaging materials to create indoor sculpture. I have been doing this work for around twenty years now, after having found my own personal medium and style.

I have found that many people come to me and ask how I made the decision to become a professional artist at this stage in my life. Many people who have visited my studio or an art event have expressed a desire to fulfill their creative dream and regret not doing so when they were younger. Or they wish they could create but do not have any artistic talent. I tell them that everyone has a talent for something. It may not be painting, but the trick is to try new things and find what excites you.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

One of my missions is to inspire people to look a little differently at what we consider to be trash. I use all kinds of disposable materials made from paper – from egg cartons to molded paper packaging forms to cardboard boxes. I create work that looks both old and new in an effort to bring together opposing forces in our fractured world – the East and the West, the ancient and the contemporary, the industrial and the metaphysical.

Each sculpture is unique and is driven by the materials that find their way into my studio. I have made it a goal to not actively seek out materials but to provide an opportunity for them to come to me. There is a serendipity to this method that presents an added benefit of involving others in my work. I will often receive a text with a photo of some packaging form that a friend has received when a shipping box is delivered, asking me if I can use it in my work. Or I’ll arrive home to find a pile of molded forms stacked by the front door of my studio.

This sense of collaboration fuels my work and presents me with an endless supply of materials. It gives me an opportunity to constantly work outside my comfort zone when a strange new form appears. And the rewards of having people coming to my studio with their arms full of packaging forms instead of taking them to the landfill never gets old.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

Many people do struggle to understand why I would choose to work with garbage to create art. My response to them is that anything can be art! It’s the creativity and the vision of the artist that make us look at our world in a way we might not have otherwise. We don’t have to love all art, but we can appreciate and learn from it. I see beauty in the sculpture I create and to me it does not matter what it is made of as long as it is thought provoking and new. People who view my art will see different things in it and may not understand it or even like it, but the creative spirit and intention is there all the same. If I help just one person see our world a little differently than I have achieved my goal as an artist.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nancybrittelle.com
• Instagram: nancybrittelle