Cover image | Loons

Nancy Earle was first introduced to the power of art to communicate through image and color by her father, Edwin Earle, who lived among the Hopi and honored their ceremonial life through his paintings of the Kachina dancers. The beauty and imagery of native and Southwest art began to inspire her own paintings after she spent a summer at the art Institute in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico following her graduation from Trinity College in Vermont. Returning to the States, Nancy went on to study art at the University of Vermont and later at Montclair University in New Jersey where she earned her masters degree in art in 1972.

After entering the Franciscan Order in 1967, Nancy’s artistic vision increasingly became an expression of her chosen spiritual path. In 1984, Nancy set up her Wellspring studio in rural Maine where she further developed her distinctive use of color, powerful symbols, and archetypal figures. Her paintings illuminate the sacredness that surrounds us and explore our responsibilities to the world in which we live. Using images of the moon, sun, water, mountains, vessels, and trees, she creates rich visual metaphors that touch her viewers’ deeper knowing and work to dissolve barriers of culture and creed while revealing patterns of our true connectedness. Her paintings seek to enlighten and transform as well as to heal the fissures of separation.