We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nancy Jo Haselbacher. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nancy Jo below.
Hi Nancy Jo, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Recently I worked with The Getty Center in Los Angeles to create two didactic prints for the exhibition “Blurring the Line, Manuscripts in the Age of Print”. The exhibition featured items from the collection where text and image first began to be used together in books during the 1500s. I was asked to create a copper engraving and a woodcut of a beloved watercolor of peonies from the Getty collection to illustrate how those types of prints were made for publication in books. I was thrilled to work on it since the exhibition covered so many of my favorite things, illustration, design, printmaking, education, and my serious love of books. Those plates and prints were shown in a vitrine in the exhibition right next to a print by the historic printmaker Albrecht Durer. It was incredibly meaningful to create those botanical images, to share space in the same gallery as master artists, and to experience visitors examining my prints to learn how history had been made.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I grew up in the country and was inspired to make things from nature. I drew and painted and there was always an ongoing creative project around our house; my mother was a painter and my father made concert guitars. I went to art school and became a freelance illustrator. I loved reading and books so that seemed like the most amazing job ever – to illustrate books or magazines. I still remember going to a newsstand in Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA and picking up a magazine that had my first illustration in it. I was hooked!
I freelanced in Boston for many years in tandem with teaching digital media and design, skills I’d picked up as the Macintosh made its appearance on the scene in the early 1990s. I’d also taken a printmaking class and fallen in love with it. I moved to Los Angeles to get a fresh perspective on my work and to prepare for graduate school in printmaking. I slowly transitioned my illustration career to more personal artwork and to fund my return to school, I took a job as a Creative Director in the corporate world. This was valuable experience for me since it gave me another perspective on how business runs internationally. The firm had offices in 32 countries, and I loved working with people all over the world and learning about how design and art functioned in different places. After a few years, I returned to graduate school where I studied printmaking. My dream was to teach printmaking full-time while exhibiting my own work. That dream came true. I was a Printmaking Professor at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles for the past sixteen years until June 2022, when I retired from teaching to be a full-time studio artist. It might seem like I had a master plan for all this but a lot of it involved some complex choices and flying by the seat of my pants! I’ve realized that responding to my internal compass as an artist and what direction to turn next is something that is a part of my art practice.
You are catching me in a bit of liminal space right now having recently left teaching and beginning a new career. I’m just starting to get my new artwork out there. I loved teaching and am proud of being able to be part of the lives of art students for many years. But I am excited to be headed on this new venture. My work has historically been about the traces of presence left behind in the land and body using printmaking and photography. I’ve focused in now on the land, with a deep interest in nature conservancy and biophilic design. I’m building my business using my art to create awareness of nature and its effect on healthcare and to find ways to have a direct impact, even if it is starting small.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
My recent body of work that consists of drawings and photographs from nature, using light and shadow is all about meditative practice, careful observation, and recognition that every tiny part of nature is essential. It is directed towards exhibition in healthcare organizations, and I hope will be a catalyst for healing. I have also created a set of “Drought Runes,” that are divination stones. The images on them come from photographs I have taken of the cracks in the land formed from the drought in Southern California. These and the accompanying book can be used as a mediative practice for awareness of how consideration of earth can be part of our everyday actions.
My goal as an artist is to take something we are all familiar with, something ordinary or that we take for granted even and turn it on its head a bit, make it a little mysterious so it makes you question what you are seeing. Through presenting beautiful, mysterious work, I’m hoping to tap into that feeling in others and encourage healing and protection of the land.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
There is no one “right” path for an artist. We can change at any time. Sometimes I felt pigeonholed into a certain type of artmaking or a job by expectations of others and therefore I stayed in some places a bit too long. Art school, by the nature of the structure and intensity also adds to that pressure sometimes. But a dear old friend once told me “You can change your life in a day.” Just by deciding, we can shift course. There are many paths to creativity. And they are all “right” if we decide they are.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.indeliblepress.com/
- Instagram: @indeliblepress
Image Credits
Image credit: Tom Perez