No biographical information is provided on her official website. Nothing official about Nancy Ogilvie, expelled from the art foundation department of an Ontario college after being admitted to psychiatric care. Her website seems abandoned, with just a few photos of paintings, a paltry representation of a significant body of work. She is perhaps thirty-five and has been drawing since childhood. She mostly paints on wooden panels that she collects because she can’t afford to buy canvases, but also because she likes the texture of wood. Her work gives the impression that paint seeps from the wood, that it arose from a wild, urban forest. Animal and human presences are gradually won over by the interlacing of branches, as if these painted presences were abandoned and the painter is letting nature take back the wood it’s painted on. She says she paints what she sees, inner landscapes and scenes. Perhaps she mixes the human with the animal and plant worlds to calm the intensity and even the violence of these scenes.
A writer, Marie Depussé, ended up complying with her editor’s requirement to provide a biographical note, writing, “Marie Depussé, alive, to this day.” Perhaps I could have just written: “Nancy Ogilvie, painting, to this day.”
Patrick Cady
