Nancy Cole landscape artist biography Sugar Hill Franconia New Hampshire

I do passionately believe in the purposes of creativity.

For most of her life Nancy Cole has lived in the Sugar Hill- Franconia Region of New Hampshire. This is as she says, her preferred bailiwick. Her painterly ideas of color and shape have been formed here. She has, of course, painted in other locations - Switzerland, The American Far West, even Central Asia - but the quality of light here, she believes, is warmer, lovelier than anywhere else. There is here, she says, no such thing as a white cloud, a grey rock, a green tree: All color is underlaid by warm tones of pink, lavender, orange.

After graduating from Wellesley College, Nancy Cole worked in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and New York City with the legendary Hans Hoffmann. She continued to work in a more or less solitary way. Later, her exposure to the works, first to Mark Rothko and later Wolf Kahn, themselves both former students of Hans Hoffman, encouraged her in her use of subjective color.

Nancy Cole has her studio in Franconia and lives with her daughter, son-in-law and grandson. She has shown extensively in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont and her work is in private collections in the United States, Scotland, England, and France.