About Nancy

(as told by Bella, the one in the chair behind her)

My human has had several careers, most of which she didn't plan, and one habit she never managed to break. She stops to look around.

I stop too, so we get along. The difference is that I stop to sniff things and she stops to look at them, and then, for reasons I can't work out, she goes home and paints them.

She says she's always been like this. As a girl in Southwestern Ontario she could lose a whole afternoon playing near a backyard pond and bring creatures home. Her appreciation for nature carried her through a couple of biology degrees then at 27 she stopped at a garden in Dominica for six months to illustrate plants, and some of those drawings ended up in a book. Those six months ultimately turned into twenty years, a long stop, even by my standards.

She founded and ran a biological research station there, and when the only road to it was closed for repairs, she stopped in Roseau and opened an art gallery and café with a giant, flowering talipot palm in the front courtyard. That tree waits decades to flower. She liked that about it. She named the gallery after it, and later, her studio.

Hurricane Maria ended her Dominica chapter. She came home to Canada, found work at a school for the creative arts, and in 2020 she found me. I was two and I've been keeping an eye on her ever since, as you can see.

She paints in watercolour, sometimes with ink. Sometimes she gets very close to a flower, which I respect. Sometimes she stands back to take in a field or a forest or somebody's house, which I find less useful. Either way, she paints what it felt like to be there.

She calls it Talipot Art. I call it the reason dinner is late.

Bella