Nancy Swan Drew

Nancy was raised in a Catholic... Donna Reed-inspired family outside of Detroit, Michigan, in the bedroom communities of Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills. The children's program at Cranbrook under the direction of Glen Michaels was a life raft... away from the nuns and socially driven affluent that managed to keep their community white and Christian. Her maternal grandmother, Bama, was an angel. She taught kindergarten for most of her lifetime and kept one bedroom on Parkside Avenue stocked with every possible art tool. This was a refuge, as were the sweet lake cottages in the summer months that were kept by both sets of grandparent's... places where her imagination had its way. It is every child's dream to play as often as possible, and Nancy discovered early on that art was a playground that would welcome her at any age.

She went to college and fell in love with Sherman Drew, married and, like many young girls in the 1970's, moved toward her husband's dream. That dream was to return to his childhood home, a small town called Niles, and become a lawyer in his family's firm. Because of the support from strong women friends and mentors, Nancy worked to venture past the geography and "normal" mind frames to pursue a life of mothering that included painting, drawing, clothing and card design, cartooning, and writing. Writing first on individual pieces of art and then in the form of real books.

Her language is distinct, honest, and simply complex. It references the world around her and those she has found mirrored in movies, magazines, and literature... a potluck of sorts. Because of her time spent in the suburbs wearing a plaid uniform, she remembers clearly, like the eye of a truthful camera, those women of color dressed in crisp uniforms who came in and out only by bus, and those of different religious and ethnic backgrounds not seen, whom she would later meet in Ann Arbor... thus stems her social commentary.

It was within these contrasts to the real world that she learned about the beauty and need for freethinking, inclusion, and diversity. It was also there that she discovered money... a nice thing if well spent and earned along the way... ethically earned along the way.

Her art career has percolated for over 30 years, and home is still Niles. There are three grown children... a painter and social worker, a photographer, and a lawyer. All is well on her playground, including Sherman who even paints beautiful fish prints of the day's catch. It might be noted that all playgrounds have their share of mud puddles... but if you swing just right and look up... more than down... the sun pokes through and winks.

Style and Voice:
Nancy's art has been described as expressionistic, formally influenced by 20th century artists... Chagall, Miro, Matisse, Much, Duchamp, Picasso, and Cezanne. Outsider art today is perhaps her very favorite, because it explores personal story telling with purity and pluck. She is drawn to color and shape delivered with raw energy, sometimes combining repeated patterns, textures, and collage to revel her own stories. The figure, as both a solitary being and one that is tied to many of life's precarious relationships, is often prominent. Recently a new direction toward the power and beauty of nature's landscape has invited her brush and palette. A myriad of music partners her creative process as well. Madonna, the Motels, Native American chants, classical venues, and show tunes envelop the studio... often at high, rattle-the-windows volumes... "Why have a set of nerves if you don't test them now and then?

P.S. Nancy has never suffered from what is called a "creative block", only a shortage of hours on the clock.

Click here to see some of Nancy's work