Art

The Pursuit of Creativity

Two artists’ journey from Santa Fe to Quidnessett

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Nancy Reid Carr’s parents were understandably less than thrilled when she dropped out of college a year short of graduation and moved, more or less unannounced, to Santa Fe to pursue an artist’s dream. But sometimes in your life, a light just goes off – in this case, a flashbulb – and you have to choose between the safer path and doing what calls to you.

As a creative-writing major at Roger Williams University, Nancy was required to take a studio arts class to graduate and decided to try photography. She was immediately hooked. “It came naturally to me, and my professor, Denny Moers, encouraged me to follow my artistic vision,” she recalls.

The southwest always held an allure for Nancy, but she knew nobody in Santa Fe. However, she soon found work at coffee shops, bartending and especially working for other photographers, learning the craft while getting paid to frame and print. At a time when film and darkrooms still prevailed, she began experimenting with alternative processing, including producing positive black and white images from large negatives and mounting the semi-transparent images on aluminum with bolts and plexiglass.


It was a sign of things to come, although her career in photography took a detour into marriage - she met her husband, painter R. Michael Carr, at one of the cafes where she worked - and parenthood (her daughters, Thea and Dylan Rose, are now nine and six). Nancy took jobs as a portrait photographer and even photographing horses
before she reacquainted herself with the idea of printing photographs on alumimum.

In the intervening years, digital had replaced film, and special printers using highly adhesive ink enabled Nancy to print color on both flat sheets of metal and on pieces of aluminum that can be then shaped into jewelry. Favored subjects include natural patterns found in clouds and tree branches, female figures and mandalas, circular patterns traditionally used as a focus for meditation. “In all of my work, I try to create a calm, serene vibe,” says Nancy. “I like to find a harmonious place in chaotic structures.”

The process of printing on aluminum renders any white spaces transparent, allowing the shimmering metal to show through and lending a luminous, three-dimensional effect to Nancy’s photos. “It has changed the way I shoot,” she explains. “If I see a beautiful green field full of trees and grasses, I don’t even bother now because there’s no white.”

She has also learned to oversaturate colors and tweak images to bring out contrasts that best show off the metal, lending a luminosity to backlit clouds, for example.

Nancy exhibits her work at regional art shows – including side-by-side with her husband at this year’s Wickford Art Festival – and sells via wholesalers to a variety of specialty shops, as well. The couple recently moved from cramped quarters in West Warwick to a new home in the Quidnessett area of North Kingstown that includes a shared 1,500 square-foot studio with enough space to welcome in customers and perhaps one day provide gallery space for their paint- ings and photos.

Photographer and oil painter work side-by-side, frequently seeking out each other’s opinions and feedback. “Although we don’t collaborate, we still communicate a lot,” says Nancy. “We’re kind of opposite personalities: he’s very mellow and laid-back, and I’m more high-strung and hot-headed, but if we were more similar we’d probably butt heads.”

After stints in Santa Fe and Charleston, S.C., the Carrs are happy to be back in Michael’s home state and the place where Nancy first decided to follow her artistic heart. “Rhode Island is the only place in New England where we had any desire to live,” and having found the perfect house to raise their family and create their artwork, “we’re never moving again,” says Nancy.

art, metal, north kingstown, nancy reid carr, r michael carr, rhode island, painting, curley

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