Citizens of the village of Saugerties know Nancy Campbell by her advocacy of All Things Art. Having co-owned (with Angela Gaffney-Smith) and operated a gallery for a number of years, her involvement in local art promotion has been both vigorous and continuous. The gallery eventually became a co-op where she maintained a studio while producing many events in the area, primarily because she wanted to bring attention to the fact that the area is saturated with hundreds, maybe thousands, of talented artists. She has been instrumental in organizing art shows and activities for children and high school students. She belongs to the Woodstock Artists Association and is an instructor at the Woodstock School of Art, where she also serves on the Board of Advisors. And like many artists in the region, Campbell can be counted on to contribute her work to local worthy causes, such as the Solite Barn auction held last year to raise money for the resurrection of a Dutch barn in the village.

For the past couple of years Campbell has served as councilwoman for the Town of Saugerties. As liaison to the planning and zoning committee, she has direct input on the issues that concern her most: those of environmental preservation. Combining her passion for art and being responsive to the community seems to come natural to Campbell. Maybe it’s a female thing. She considers her contemporaries and speculates that the women artists she knows are more focused on nurturing art in the greater community. Their creative processes seem to include interacting with other area artists. They’re each prolific in their personal endeavors, and yet manage to be engaged in other organizations such as the Saugerties Historical Society and the Art Tour.

She emphatically maintains that her male contemporaries are entirely willing to participate and contribute generously when called on, but, as a group, perhaps don’t seem to generate as much action on behalf of the larger community. I wondered how gender affects an artist’s relationship to his or her peers—if indeed it does—and whether in this society the typical gender roles are played out in those relationships. In Intimacy and Solitude (W.W. Norton, 1991) the author Stephanie Dowrick points to the contrasting tendencies in the male/female relational impulses; she maintains that men generally express relationship through action, while women tend to focus on interaction.

In regards to the creative impulse, it might then be considered that men take action through simply doing art; while women are more likely to use their art as yet another means to interact socially and be in relationship with the larger community. Thus, there might be a predominance (at least locally) of women in associations, which nurture and promote themselves and each other. Neither mode of the creative impulse is right or wrong, better or worse than the other. Campbell reiterates the inter-activism of local women artists and says, “It must inform their art as well. I can only speak for me. I don’t think I could be an artist that lived in a garret and painted by myself. I’m a landscape painter. I create art that’s part of the world around me. Maybe if I were painting more abstract stuff, I’d be a different kind of artist.”

I asked how she personally responds to abstract art. “I think having an abstract painter for a son has helped me learn. I can understand the theories, but it’s not always accessible. Seeing his process, he’ll start out with a shape and a color and he’ll see something in it…for him it’s about the paint and the color and the shapes, and that’s what all art is. I don’t know if you can really make a distinction between abstract art and representational art. I think it’s all how you feel at the moment.”

It’s always impressive, overwhelming even, to enter an artist’s space and witness the volume and variety of work she’s accomplished. Creative self-expression being just that—the expression of one person’s unique perspective on what is noticeable and worth rendering, the opportunity to take in that person’s view of life is an enriching gift. Campbell’s offerings honor the life around her. She walks me through the house, introducing me to her own work as well as that of other artist friends. She describes her processes: oftentimes photographing scenes to bring home and sketch in pencil or charcoal, then transform in oils. She says, “I enhance, but I don’t invent. Sometimes it’s better not to literally interpret something.” That statement refers to a painting of mountains with a sort of rolling hayfield in the foreground. She’s not satisfied with it. “The bottom [of the painting] is boring, but the top is really nice.” I say it’s interesting because I don’t know exactly what to make of it. She thinks she might just cut it off, and we laugh at that possibility. Working in oils does afford a painter the capability to correct or repaint a canvas entirely.

“I’ve indulged in art essentially since 1978. I was a late bloomer. When I was a kid I loved to draw. At school, the nuns would tear out a picture from a coloring book on Fridays, and the whole class would copy it. That was art for the first eight years, from age six to age thirteen. So, I never got into the habit of art classes. It wasn’t until after I’d grown up and worked for several years that I said ‘Wait a second…I want to go to school to do art.’ So, I went to Ulster County Community College for two years, back when they had an extensive visual arts program, then went on to study with various artists at the Woodstock School of Art doing watercolor.” The medium lends itself to raising kids, she says. Later she became entranced with oils, their slow drying time and malleability. “I still love watercolor, but there are so many oil paintings I want to do. In the last ten years, I’ve devoted a substantial portion of my time to art.”

Upon being elected to the town board, she closed down the studio in the business district and moved her paints and easels to an upstairs bedroom in her home. Now it’s really art and government, which is actually a pretty good combination for Campbell. “It’s a natural thing for me, because the reason I got involved is that I think it’s beautiful here. And if you want it to stay beautiful, you have to become involved. If you want to see something good happen, you have to do it. Planning and zoning are crucial to preserving the landscape, and I’m a landscape painter. It really goes hand in hand for me.”

And what about the glaciers? When her husband’s work moved the family to Germany for four years, Campbell took full advantage of the rich history of art there, visiting museums and galleries, exposing herself to the work of European masters, and painting landscapes during her travels. Rifling through stacks of prints of her work—she’s pleased to report that the originals were sold and now hang in other places—she comes across a couple of paintings done in the Swiss Alps. One of them, “Near the Jungfrau,” looks like a scene above the ocean, perhaps viewed from a bluff. Campbell points out that this “ocean” is, in fact, a glacier—a slow moving body of water curling down the mountainside. Another piece depicts the dramatic scope of those mountains with its tiny cows standing in contrast to their vast surroundings.

Clearly, Campbell appreciates the simple beauty of nature and the human-made life in it. She is struck by the way light—both natural and artificial—reflects and illuminates subject matter. She’s done a number of scenes in twilight that evoke an almost Dickensian yearning to become a part of some cozy village life. Which is not a difficult sentiment to imagine in a place like Saugerties; in fact, she’s had prints made of her townscapes that appeal to villagers and out-of-town visitors alike. “I just like the way light plays on a building or just little bits of the landscape. I don’t take a grand Hudson River School view of landscape; it’s more of an intimate thing.” Her extensive repertoire also includes interior landscapes, portraits of friends and family members lounging in a comfy chair or napping on a couch. “I guess I kind of paint my life.”

Campbell’s work can be seen on her Web site: www.nancycampbellart.com. She’ll be exhibiting in the Café at Kingston Barnes & Noble during the month of April.