Featured Artists

	Pegasus Gallery 275 South Main Street, Bishop, California 93514 Phone:(760) 937-2060 Hours: Wed.-Sun. 1:00-5:30 pm and by appointment Contact: Eva Poole-Gilson, Owner

Nancy Overholtz

At Peace with the Paintbrush
by Eva Poole-Gilson

“As early as I could hold a pencil—that’s when I remember beginning to draw,” Nancy Overholtz answered when asked about how it all began. “I loved it. I drew animals, mostly horses. My brother still teases me about them. He said I always began with a capital M. That was the ears! But, maybe surprisingly, my parents did recognize a talent in me. My mother arranged for me to have lessons with her artist-cousin, Lee Addison. We drew and did pastels and charcoals, oil, and pen and ink. I met with her once a week for two years—from about age 13 to 15, and in high school I took every art class I could, even a paint-on-site class one summer. We visited galleries and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”

Pretty exciting for a girl from rural New Jersey.

“You bet! I liked the Impressionists. And I especially liked Turner and Van Gogh. Until my senior year of high school I thought I’d be making a career in art. But it was the height of Pop Art—which I couldn’t get excited about, and I couldn’t see a way to make a living in the art world of that time.”

Even though Nancy’s best friend came from a family of three sisters who all knew they’d head off to college, somehow she herself didn’t have that built-in expectation and family encouragement. She took a job as a typist.

“I was introverted, ungainly, and unsure of myself.”

That’s what she said—honest! It’s hard to believe, looking at her now, and at her watercolors: exquisitely extroverted, gainly, sure.

How and when did she leave that uncertain young girl behind and become a successful artist?

It wasn’t overnight….

But the shy girl always wanted to be a surfer! and surf her way around the world…. So after about a decade of indoor, office work, Nancy made her way to California.

“I landed in San Diego. And I did try surfing. But I also ended up in another demanding, difficult job….”

During the twenty-three years she lived and worked in the city she only took two art classes, both in watercolor painting. One she enrolled in a few years after arriving in California. “But,” she said, “it was hopeless. I felt like an artistic failure for the first time, and I gave it up.”

It was sixteen years before she picked up that watercolor paintbrush again. This time she did learn. “It was a Vista Adult Ed class. The teacher was great. I didn’t care for her painting style, but I learned techniques. I took her class twice. One of the techniques was wet-on-wet, with salt. I did an oceanscape with a headland in the foreground. I mixed quite a few browns for that foreground, and then poured on the salt. The browns didn’t look like what I’d hoped, but the salt…. Well, that teacher came around and exclaimed ‘Oh, Nancy, that’s beautiful!’ and she brought everyone in the class around me to see. They asked me all kinds of questions—how’d I put the salt on, what kind of salt…. ‘With a shaker, Morton’s Iodized….’”

Nancy laughs.

But that class gave her the foundation of how watercolor works—even though she doesn’t have a portfolio of wonderful paintings from it.

Toward the end of twenty-three, city years—23!—a good friend finally convinced Nancy that the stress was doing her in. She needed a backpacking trip to the High Sierra….

Six months later she moved to Bishop!

Here the plot speeds up. She fell in love with another artist, the woodworker Ron Overholtz. One day while he was turning wood, Nancy decided to paint. “I still have that little watercolor, framed, on my wall. It was a desert cholla, a plant with a lovely pink blossom. It actually looked like a cholla!”

It wasn’t long before she painted a wolf…and it looked like a wolf!

She was off and running, painting wolves all over the place.

By 1998 she and her husband decided to do the Bishop Labor Day Art Show together.