(bright music) (bright music continues) - [Nancy] What I love about painting this place is that there's an infinite variety of options.

There's vineyards, there's orchards, there's river, there's mountains, it's never ending.

(bright music continues) (brush swooshing) My name is Nancy Houfek Brown, and I am a painter, an oil painter.

I make large abstracted landscapes using geometric forms and flat plains of color, of sights and scenes in the Columbia River Gorge.

(bright music continues) (bright music continues) I like to go out into the countryside and take photographs and there's a right-angle turn in the road, and they had just put these street signs up, directional street signs.

I had to stop and take a photo of that because it was this moment of that is one of the coolest things to see, "Which Way" is the name of the painting.

(car humming) Sometimes we go for a ride in the country.

(gasps) Wow!

- Yeah, yeah.

- Look at that!

Fortunately, Al does the driving, so I'm looking at things going, "Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh."

Taking photographs along the way.

(car door thudding) (Nancy laughing) Wow.

Rowena Crest has a viewpoint with an amazing panorama of the gorge and the geological formations.

You could see the basalt cliffs, you could see how the gorge was made.

It was like, "I've got to make a painting of that."

And then you go a little bit further.

Beautiful time of day.

And the wind comes up over that cliff constantly, and there are raptors dancing in the wind and playing.

Oh wow.

I took some photos, it's hard to capture a raptor in motion, but I thought, "I want to do that."

And then you walk another 10 feet and you're looking at the balsam route, just wildly blooming.

(camera shuttering) Yes, hundreds of photographs, and then I want to paint my emotional response to it, and my emotional response to it isn't realistic.

I don't want to copy nature.

(bright music) But when I come back in the studio, all these photos are on my iPhoto program.

(bright music continues) So I'm scrolling through them and looking at them, and looking, and deleting, deleting, deleting, delete, delete, delete, delete.

"Ah, that's the one, that's the one."

(bright music continues) Then with a pencil, I go as quickly as I can.

How would I draw this if I were four years old?

How would I do this?

How would I make these trees?

Well, they're not going to have lots of branches.

They're just going to look like little things.

"Oh, that shadow is just a little block of stuff."

At that point, I take the drawing and I photograph that.

Then I can put it directly into Procreate.

(bright music continues) It saves me making five, six oil sketches.

I can try things out.

It's too dark, so if I were painting it, it would be a problem, but now I can just find a lighter color.

(bright music continues) And when I feel like I've got a good sense of the color in the composition, I will print it out.

(bright music continues) I put the grid on it and I can make the drawing square by square, so I have more accuracy to what I've already created.

And then I draw the drawing on it, so it's still looking somewhat like my child's drawing.

(bright music continues) I begin to draw the grid on the canvas in a very, very pale, pale, pale, pale yellow.

So it's going to be easy to paint over, and I just use the grid, get the drawing on, and then I start painting.

(bright music continues) (bright music continues) (brush swishing) There's a moment where the painting starts to speak to me.

It's morphing as I'm painting.

(bright music continues) And then there's a moment where I'm done with this painting.

If I do anymore, I'll wreck it.

Both of my parents were artists.

My mother had been an art major in college, she was a talented portrait drawer and painter.

(emotional music) In my early mid 20s, I decided I wanted to go to acting school, and then I continued on my career and I performed throughout the Western states as a stage actor.

And that's actually how I met Al, my husband.

- It was at a reading of one of my plays and Nancy walked in and I said, "Who is that?"

And it really was, love at first sight is real.

I began to learn all the things that I really needed to learn about living once I met her.

- And then I shifted out of being an actor to being an educator, and got a job at the University of Minnesota in the theater department.

I would take art classes.

I would still make art and still draw sketches.

So Al and I, when we were in Minnesota, we started windsurfing and we learned and we got gear, and then one summer, this was 1996, everybody was saying, "Oh, you got to go to Hood River, it's the best."

I was doing a gig in New York and Al drove out to Hood River and I get these calls saying, "This is the most beautiful place in the world, you've got to come."

- [Al] When we finally got her out here, she was just almost speechless.

- It was like nothing I'd ever seen before.

I had all this experience on stage, also teaching at University of Minnesota and gotten quite the reputation as an educator.

I was head of voice and speech at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University.

(bright music) I was always drawing, always painting, always drawing things.

It was always a current in my life.

(bright music continues) So then in 2002, we were both kind of depressed at the same time, you know how that happens with a couple, when you're both depressed at the same time, it's not so good.

And I thought, "You know what?

Let's buy a house in Hood River.

Well, let's try it, let's see how it works."

(car humming) (birds chirping) - It gave me a feeling of maybe it was like home, finally a real home.

Not Boston, not a city, a small town where we could really be ourselves.

(bright music) - [Nancy] I just started every day painting and it just kept getting better and better.

- I went downtown Hood River to Columbia Center for the Arts, and I started saying, "You folks really need to see my wife's art."

Then the gallery manager came up and then she got into a show there and it was small things at first, and then kaboom.

- All of a sudden the painting emerged as this new voice that had distinct shadows, had distinct shapes, had a vocabulary, it has a red barn in it.

A lot of my paintings have little red barns in them.

It has the mountain in the simplest shape possible for the mountain, and it was an "Aha" moment.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) And then we got one.

Tell me, Al, is this good or that?

- Yeah, good.

- That's good?

(bright music continues) The Gorge Artists Open Studio Tour is an annual three-day event where artists throughout the gorge open up their studios to the public, and people come from 10 o'clock to five o'clock for three days, and they look at art and they buy art.

Thanks so much.

I find that a lot of people collect my art, who the simplicity and clarity, and maybe even the math part of it appeals to them.

- It's beautiful, I've never seen anything like it.

- People love her work.

They come from all over the place to get it, whether it's here at the gallery or at her studio.

So not surprisingly, she was gorge artist of the year, a few years ago.

People come to Hood River now for the art scene.

I think there is something special about this area.

The light is amazing, it's an artwork of itself.

- Good seeing you again.

- Great to see you.

- Wonderful work.

- Thank you, thank you, thank you.

- I'm an old guy.

I'll probably go before she does, and I was looking at her the other day, she'll be just fine 'cause she has all these friends and I just thought I got to experience all this time with her and doing all this crazy stuff we've done.

To know that she'll be okay is a really wonderful feeling.

- I don't know what's next, but that curiosity and willingness to be open to learning and changing and growing constantly is my fountain of youth.

I hope that whoever gets one of my paintings enjoys looking at it for years and years and years, and perhaps even generations.

(bright music continues) (bright music fades) (no audio) - [Narrator] Oregon Art Beat shares the stories of Oregon's amazing artists, and member support completes the picture.

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