Nancy Flury Carlson
Nancy Flury Carlson has a BA in Art from Drury College in Springfield, Missouri. She has been a member of the Pittsburgh Print Group since 1997. Exhibits include The New Collective (2016-2017) at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Black (2013) at the Martha Gault Gallery of Slippery Rock University, and the Pittsburgh Print Group group show (2009) at the Merrick Art Gallery in New Brighton, Pennsylvania.
Like many people, I first made a linoleum block print in the seventh grade. For most people that’s a one-time experience, but I always came back to it. While linocuts are predominant in my work, I sometimes use other relief media as well as monotype approaches. I love color but also love the starkness of black and white. Working in black and white is a way of making order out of chaos, answering for each part of an image: Is it there or isn’t it? Is it on or is it off? What arrangement of black and white will represent the texture, the gray, the shadow? The best part is the surprise, the moment the paper is pulled from the block, and the work is seen for the first time after all that time spent drawing, carving, and inking. And don’t forget the smell of the ink.
More recently I’ve been using LEGO™ plates as a relief medium for printmaking. Using a large rectangular plate as the base, I place smaller round, square, and rectangular plates on top, inking them in stages to make multi-layer multi-color prints. This is a highly structured medium, a departure from my usual free-form approach to printmaking, yet the results can be unexpectedly lively.