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Biography

Nancy Brittelle was born in 1949 in Bayshore, NY, and grew up in central New Jersey. She began painting in 1995 and within a year was asked to begin showing in galleries. After 10 years as a realistic painter, her work began to increasingly feature abstract, expressionistic forms and subject matter.  While driving one afternoon, she spotted a cardboard box lying beside the road which was becoming disfigured in the rain, and was struck by its beauty. Upon returning home, she retrieved a box from her garage, set it out on the deck in the rain and replicated the process.  After bringing the box back into her studio and reshaping it, she then glued it together and painted it with acrylic paint. This process of reformed deconstruction is now a primary feature in her work, taking the form of wall and free-standing sculptures.

Nancy now lives and works in Blowing Rock in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Her work is found in collections around the United States and abroad.  She has shown in many solo and group exhibits and continues to develop her "Heavy Metal" series in which she creates sculptures from the endless variety of paper packaging materials found in our everyday lives.  A self-taught artist, Nancy considers Robert Rauschenberg and Louise Nevelson to be major influences.  Her source material consists almost entirely of expendable commercial waste, counterbalancing our fragmented, disposable culture.  The resulting work seeks to unite opposing forces in our modern society - The East and the West, the contemporary and the ancient, the metaphysical and the industrial.  

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