Nancy Roemer Sperry, - n/a -
Member Since April 2009
Artist Statement
Welcome to Nancy Roemer Sperry's Original Art
Nancy has created art for her personal pleasure and the enjoyment of others throughout most of her ninety-plus years of life. She is best known for her renderings of wildflowers, but has also captured the beauty of garden flowers, trees and grasses, fruits and vegetables, and much more with equal simplicity, grace and detail.About the ArtistIsabel Nancy Roemer was born in Struthers, Ohio, in 1914. She began drawing while in high school, and later attended the Cleveland School of Fine Art in 1936-37 and the Cincinnati Academy of Commercial Art from 1937 to 1939. Marriage to Russell L. Sperry in late 1939, moves to Glendora and then Ojai, California, and raising four children allowed her only limited time for art from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s. Nancy and her husband moved to Bend, Oregon, in 1968 where she joined a local artists' club - The Sagebrushers - and produced a few oils and watercolors. Nancy did not begin drawing frequently, however, until the early 1970s, when she was inspired by the complex shapes of the Juniper trees and beauty of the wildflowers scattered about their seven acres of beautiful land.
After moving from Oregon to Santa Barbara, California, in 1987, Nancy began drawing native grasses and wildflowers, and sold a limited selection of her work at the local Botanic Gardens. Her many new friends encouraged her to create more art, and for several years they brought her "challenges" to draw and drove her to the nearby mountains every spring to capture the beauty of living wildflowers.
In 1994, Nancy started drawing colorful vegetables and fruits; these drawings proved very popular at the Good Earth Restaurant in Goleta, where her some of her originals were available in the gift shop for a few years. She was asked to draw her nephew's dog in 1996, and subsequently created a few more drawings of pets for friends and relatives.
Even at age 85, Nancy spent an hour or two each day on her art, saying there was "Always something more to draw", and so continued putting on paper the beauty of nature until only the past few years. She turned 90 in November, 2004, and with the help of her sons Russ and Harry and Russ's daughter Cindy, Nancy focused her time on organizing and preserving the art produced during her 70-year career.
After a brief illness, Nancy passed away very peacefully on June 2, 2009, with her sons Harry and Russ by her side.About the Images
Using her father’s CanoScan 9950 scanner, Cindy began this project by preserving about four dozen of her grandma’s drawings in digital form during the summer of 2005. These were retouched by Nancy’s son Russ and archived on CDs in order to preserve them, and eight images were used to produce small notecards which were available for a time at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. Since then, another 160 or so of nearly 600 works of art have been scanned and then retouched to compensate for the yellowing of the inexpensive paper on which most of them were originally done. The background of nearly all of the scans has been replaced with a slight beige tint (#FFF8E8) to replicate the warm tones of the original paper and to cover blemishes and spots. Each of the scans has been printed for Nancy’s approval, and any fading or color changes corrected to her satisfaction before the final archiving of the images.
While a few of Nancy’s earlier paintings are larger, the majority of her colored pencil drawings vary from about 5 x 7 to 9 x 12 inches in size. The earlier scans were saved at a uniform 6.75 x 9.00 inches a 600 dpi resolution, the more recent ones at 7.50 x 10.00 inches at 720 dpi, all in TIFF format. The images which appear here were converted to highest-resolution JPG before uploading to this site.
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