Nancy Simonds

Nancy Simonds creates small- and large-scale abstract paintings and collages on paper, working primarily with gouache. Her practice centers on carefully arranged forms—blocks, stacks, ovoids, color shards, and cropped shapes—that explore the expressive relationships between color, structure, and balance. Through these compositions, she seeks to evoke a sense of transcendent order, creating images that stand as quiet counterpoints to chaos.

Each work invites reflection and contemplation. Shaw’s paintings feature layered color and soft, tactile surfaces developed through blotting and dabbing many hues onto Reeves printmaking paper. The resulting textures create subtle depth and luminosity.

Her “stack” series reflects a long-standing interest in architectural materials such as bricks, concrete blocks, and openings within built structures. Earlier in her career, she painted still lifes in oil, but her fascination with the relationships between shape and color gradually led her toward abstraction and the medium of gouache.