Nancy Cadogan
“A book contains an entire universe you can only bring to life in your imagination, if you agree to give it time. It is a tribute to privacy, an honouring of the interior life.” – Nancy Cadogan
Nancy Cadogan is a British figurative painter living in the UK. She has been exhibiting her work globally since 2004 with shows in London, New York, Rome, Oslo and Miami. Cadogan paints from imagination and observation to explore themes of literature, time, and still moments. Her paintings invite the viewer to share her joyful appreciation of contemplative observation. Her focus on colour and movement rather than perspective or shadow enables a more sensory experience that collapses boundaries between reality and the imagined.
Cadogan’s paintings in the ‘Still Reading’ series, engage with ideas of time and a private dialogue with literature. The genesis for the series originates from 2011, when she made her first book paintings for the London Antiquarian Book Fair. They capture the immense potential and excitement of reading and the possibilities of language within their diminutive scale. In one sense, the works are typical of the still life genre and record a sense of time passing. In another, they reflect on the concept of stillness more widely, as a rare condition within our hyper-networked contemporary reality, and instead celebrate quiet reflection.
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1. Nancy Cadogan, August
2. Nancy Cadogan, Homegrown
3. Nancy Cadogan, A Whole Life
4. Nancy Cadogan, Tiffany's Blue
5. Nancy Cadogan, Fragile Possibilities
6. The artist Nancy Cadogan
