Nancy Steiger Park
Biography
Ms. Park is a native Oklahoman who always knew she would be an artist. From Midwest City High School, she went straight to Oklahoma University and majored in art. Sculpture and commercial art were her focal subjects, because she intended to direct her career toward advertising or publishing art. As well as a career, she had two wonderful children, Ann and Drew, who have now provided her with six grandchildren. Ann Park Stigers is the mother of the children, and many of Ms. Park's paintings reflect the Massachusetts North Shore beauty, where Ann and her family live.
Artist’s Statement
I like to call my style “magic realism” — art so realistic you can look at a seascape and smell the salt air, or look at a portrait and see that little girl stepping out of the frame; and yet also art that evokes the magic in reality: the depth, emotion, and dimensionality that no photograph can achieve.
I often need to work from photographs, especially in doing children’s portraits: life does not hold still to be painted. But the camera, a mechanism, can never catch the wonders that fill the camera in my mind. There is a limit to the richness of color in a photograph, a limit to the secrets a photograph can impart. I think what I most love doing is assembling everything in a still life but the flowers, and painting as much as I can before I go get the flowers, so I can paint them before they fade. Even in still lifes, decay and entropy triumph — and only the rarest and most talented photographers can catch even a glimpse of the magic.
I can lose myself on the edge of walking into whatever painting I’m creating, but I don’t try for a painting so realistic you could mistake it for a photograph. I prefer the literary definition of “magic realism” — a reality so real it fuses scientific, physical reality and psychological human reality, with its thoughts, dreams, and imaginings. My paintings are a product of my yearning to stretch my horizons, to reproduce the magic I see.
When I started out, I began by examining still lifes, landscapes, and portraits made before photography. I realized that artists like Jan Vermeer and Rosa Bonheur had to train their minds to observe keenly and remember what they saw with precision. I trained myself to visually memorize images that fascinated me. I use photographs as only one reference. Look at a photo of a shadow falling across a lawn, then look at the lawn itself. In the photo, the shadow is a gray swath across a bright, uniform green. In reality, the lawn is full of colors, dark green, light green, pale moss, yellow, and the shadow’s gray will show you lavenders and purples — and, perhaps, the ghost of a lawn you played on as a small child or a lawn on which fairies dance.
Every painting I do is my child, and selling them isn’t easy for me. I keep wanting to ask my clients to provide them good homes! I can’t leave a painting alone until it glows with vibrancy and life, and looks realer than real. Love and passion go into each one, and what my husband calls “twiddle” — the light little personal touches that feel so natural to paint and look so right for the work. The magic.
Résumé
In 1964 Ms. Park had her first job at Semco Color Press. After a six-month break to have a child, she resumed her career at Lowe Runkle Advertising in Oklahoma City. She was transferred to the Tulsa office and promoted to Creative Art Director there. Later she had her own illustration studio, called Graphic Concepts, in Tulsa.
In 1971 she moved to Springfield, MO and worked for Huddleston-Chappell Advertising, and then Noble and Associates. Moving again, this time to Washington, D.C., she worked for Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association as a designer and illustrator for their publications, Pilot Magazine and Ultralights. After seven years, she tried a new career path as the Chief Designer for a signage company. Later she opened her own boutique agency in the greater Washington area. Ms. Park accepted a position as Art Editor for VocEd Magazine at American Vocational Association in 1984, and in 1987, moved back to Oklahoma and worked for The Daily Oklahoman, the state’s major newspaper, as an ad designer and illustrator. During her long art career, Ms. Park had many awards and honors for her design work and illustration. Having always combined her fine art endeavors with her commercial art, honors and awards also came for paintings she entered in competitions.
Her first “Best of Show” award was given to her in the late ‘60s at a Tulsa art show for the painting of a little girl.
Retired from The Oklahoman in 2002, Ms. Park now paints full-time for pleasure and profit. Commissioned portraits are among her clients’ favorite requests.
Ms. Park has retired from more than five years of editing Central Oklahoma Mensa’s newsletter. At American Mensa’s annual gathering in July 2008, she was awarded the “Owl” for her work. Only one is given a year. This award is given to the newsletter considered the all-over best in the United States for that year.
Recently she finished illustrating a book with her cartoon sketches. It is by Reginald Wickham, published by Morgan James Publishing, and is called “You May Kiss the Bride! (Now What?)”
Ms. Park shows her work in the annual Clinton Art Show in June, the OAG “Small Wonders Show” in the Summer, and in the “OAG Member Show” in the Fall. She was in the first artists’ group to win signature status from the Oklahoma Art Guild, has won several awards, and often has her paintings in the Guild’s juried “Spring Art Show.”