PRINTGetting DeClue
Finding her passion and claiming it, too
Zachary Siebert
Columbia artist Nancy DeClue, pictured with Small Wonders, is just beginning to respond with a firm “yes,” when referred to as an artist. “The first time it came out of my mouth, it was a major deal,” she says.
May 8, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Ann Bise turned to Nancy DeClue when she was diagnosed with cancer at age 49. For Bise and her family, time was precious. Bise wasn’t requesting medical help. She needed DeClue, an oncology nurse turned professional artist, to translate her vision onto a canvas.
The request was a first for DeClue, but she was familiar with the territory. DeClue’s art, which varies from abstract paintings to detailed botanical drawings, concentrates on nature, humanity and spirituality.
DeClue, originally from Jefferson City, was fascinated with art from an early age. But her nursing profession took over the time she would have spent making art.
In 2001, DeClue herniated discs in her neck, which resulted in a forced disability leave from nursing. She turned the mishap into an opportunity and enrolled in a printmaking class and two painting classes. Finally, she could devote her energy to art, which includes a wide range of mediums such as oils, printmaking techniques, pastels and machine appliqué, a sewing technique.
Four years after her injury, she immersed herself in a life of creativity and was granted a two-month residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, N.M. She’d begin her days with an hour of journaling, music and coffee as she sat before blooming lavender under Santa Fe’s magnificent sky. There, she created Small Wonders — a large-scale linoleum block print exploring the loss of species and resources as viewed through the veil of civilization. DeClue wrote of the piece, “If we could hear with our feeble ears the combined cries of the species that we are pushing to extinction it might break our hearts open to the miracle of life in all forms. But we cannot hear this cry. But we have art.” DeClue, now 53, was no longer “a nurse who did a lot of art in the meantime.” She was an artist.
The art request from Bise was a way to put on paper a vision she had while undergoing treatment for cancer. In the vision, a maple tree from her childhood home appeared. The painting, Ann’s Vision - Epiphany II is Bise’s ascension from earth before the maple tree.
Initially, Bise didn’t tell her husband, Richard, about the painting. He recalls his wife saying, “‘I don’t know if you think I’m odd or not for commissioning a painting, but this is my view of death.’”
“To me, the meaning of the painting changed from Ann’s breaking through from the hubris of illness to health, to her breaking from the hubris of the material world to the next step of her journey,” DeClue says.
Now, a year and a half after Ann Bise’s passing, Richard Bise is undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer. He loves the painting because it’s a constant reminder of his wife. “The painting takes away a lot of those words we have to say,” Richard Bise says. “We don’t have to talk about her much because she left us something to know her by. She was always the glue that kept the family together. She’s still doing that in the painting.”
DeClue remembers the piece essentially painting itself. “My hands were used, but someone else had painted it, and they just used my fingers to do that,” she says. “Evidently, it’s just what she wanted.”
