Nancy J. McLaughlin: Nature, Memory, and Gestural Abstraction

Nancy J. McLaughlin is an American painter whose practice is grounded in a sustained engagement with the natural landscape. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1954, McLaughlin has spent the better part of five decades refining a gestural, expressionist approach to painting that draws equally from lived experience, art historical precedent, and an abiding conviction that nature constitutes both subject matter and spiritual imperative. Her works, executed primarily in acrylic on unstretched cotton canvas, are marked by energised brushwork, a vibrant chromatic range, and a compositional looseness that invites the viewer to encounter the land not as a topographic fact but as an emotional and sensory field.

This article offers a thorough critical examination of McLaughlin's background, artistic methodology, and the eight paintings currently featured on her ArtRewards profile, situating each work within the broader context of her practice and the expressive traditions from which it emerges.

Ohio woodlands

Biographical Background

McLaughlin's earliest encounters with nature were decidedly unmediated. Raised in the suburbs of Columbus, she was drawn as a child to the wilder margins of her environment, a remote ravine behind the Ohio State School for the Blind, the woodlands surrounding her school, and later the rural landscapes of northern Michigan, where summers were spent on horseback and in self-constructed shelters in the woods. These formative experiences established a sensory vocabulary that would, in time, find articulation through paint.

Her interest in drawing emerged early, with an initial focus on horses and what she describes as "places of escape." The impulse to represent and inhabit these spaces through mark-making was present well before any formal training. When her mother provided a small set of oil paints and a canvas board during her primary school years, McLaughlin encountered, for the first time, the resistance and complexity of the painted surface, a difficulty she identifies as constitutive of the medium's appeal.

McLaughlin enrolled at Bowling Green State University, initially pursuing a pre-medical programme before redirecting her studies toward fine art. She graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting, a minor in creative writing, and a secondary teaching certification. Her academic formation exposed her to a range of media, though she was most drawn to acrylic and watercolour, which she found compatible with her preference for layered, rapidly built surfaces. The relative speed at which acrylic paint dries, combined with its gestural application and its tolerance for overpainting, aligned naturally with her working methods.

Following her studies, McLaughlin relocated first to Tucson, Arizona, and then to Seattle, Washington, where she would remain for the greater part of her adult life. In 1980, she took on a position as a locomotive engineer with Burlington Northern (later BNSF Railway), a career she maintained for thirty-five years. Painting continued throughout this period, accommodated alongside professional obligations, domestic life, and a commitment to physical engagement with the landscapes that animated her work, hiking, backpacking, and skiing in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

Artistic Influences and Intellectual Formation

McLaughlin's artistic sensibility was shaped by a sequence of encounters that broadened her understanding of what landscape painting could accomplish. During her formative years, she was drawn to the stylised graphic work prevalent in the 1970s, but her engagement deepened considerably through contact with artists who sought not merely to depict landscape but to communicate its metaphysical substance.

Arthur Dove

In college, she was particularly drawn to the nature-abstracted works of Arthur Dove and Charles Burchfield, two American painters whose responses to the natural world moved well beyond documentary representation. Dove, widely regarded as one of the earliest practitioners of abstract painting in the United States, developed a visual language of organic form and colour resonance; Burchfield, by contrast, imbued his landscapes with an almost animistic energy, attributing to the natural world an expressive life that extended beyond its visible surfaces. Both artists modelled a practice of attentive, emotionally engaged looking that left a measurable impression on McLaughlin's own approach.

The move to Seattle introduced her to the work of Emily Carr and the Canadian Group of Seven abstract landscape painters of the early to mid-twentieth century, whose canvases rendered the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest and Canada with a spiritual intensity and formal boldness that was, for McLaughlin, revelatory. Carr, in particular, whose densely rhythmic treatments of forest and sky conveyed both the scale and the animism of the West Coast landscape, demonstrated that painting could be a vehicle for communicating the mood and essence of a place rather than its topographic appearance. This distinction proved central to the development of McLaughlin's own practice.

Emily Carr

Her time in Seattle also brought her into contact with muralism and urban street art, which she engaged with as a form of public visual culture characterised by bold colour and narrative accessibility. The muralists' willingness to work at scale, to address a broad and varied audience, and to treat public space as a site of aesthetic intervention reinforced McLaughlin's interest in paintings that communicate directly and without intermediaries.

Underlying all of these influences is a recurring philosophical preoccupation: the desire to recover the quality of perception associated with childhood, a state of heightened attentiveness, of felt connection with the nonhuman world, which McLaughlin regards as having been progressively suppressed by adult acculturation. Her paintings are, in this sense, instruments of recollection and reconnection: attempts to restore, through colour and gesture, something of the original intensity of that primal relationship with nature.

Artistic Process and Material Practice

McLaughlin works primarily in acrylic paint on cotton canvas, frequently incorporating gestural marks made with Stabilo coloured pencils to introduce linear definition and textural contrast into otherwise purely painterly surfaces. The canvas is typically left unstretched during the painting process, hung on the studio wall to allow for free compositional movement without the structural constraints of a stretcher frame.

Her working method resists linear prescription. She may begin with a photographic reference or direct observation, but rarely with a fully resolved concept. The initial stages of a painting are characterised by openness and deliberate indeterminacy, a gestural sketch executed with brushes of varying sizes, followed by successive applications of colour that allow form to emerge organically. McLaughlin describes this early phase in terms that emphasise receptivity over control: the goal is to avoid imposing a predetermined outcome, allowing instead for the painting to develop its own internal logic. This approach, she notes, is premised on a kind of productive uncertainty that keeps the work alive and responsive.

Compositional resolution comes later. Once the initial gestural foundation has been established and the forms have begun to cohere, McLaughlin turns her attention to refinement, sharpening the composition, attending to the relationship between elements, and determining what narrative or emotional experience the work is ultimately concerned with. The process is iterative and, at times, recursive: paintings that stall may be set aside for later reassessment, or worked through with the sustained attention one might bring to an unresolved problem.

The decision to leave canvases unstretched serves both practical and aesthetic purposes. Practically, it facilitates safe rolling and shipping; aesthetically, it preserves the painting's tactile softness and its sense of material immediacy. Each work is provided with a canvas border, typically three inches around the painted image, to accommodate gallery-wrap stretching at the collector's discretion.

The range of works currently on her ArtRewards profile, spanning 2021 to 2024, reflects a practice in sustained development, one in which the balance between figuration and abstraction, between specific place and felt experience, continues to shift.

Critical Analysis of Works on ArtRewards

Red Off the Rails (2024)

Acrylic on canvas | 40 × 40 in (101.6 × 101.6 cm)

Red Off the Rails is among the most chromatically assertive works in McLaughlin's current ArtRewards portfolio. A gestural abstraction built from multiple shades of red, ranging, presumably, from warm crimson to cooler burgundy, registers the painting sets these reds against contrasting blues and greens in a compositional structure that privileges energy over resolution. The title carries an evocative ambiguity: "off the rails" suggests both disequilibrium and liberation, a departure from constraint that reads as formally purposeful rather than accidental.

The work's insistence on chromatic saturation places it within a lineage of colour-field-adjacent painting, though McLaughlin's gestural brushwork prevents the surface from settling into the stillness characteristic of that tradition. Instead, the marks retain the physical trace of their making visible, kinetic, and directional, locating the work firmly within an expressionist sensibility. The square format supports this reading, containing the painting's energy within a structure that resists hierarchy between vertical and horizontal axes.

As a pure abstraction, one of the relatively few works in this portfolio without a direct landscape referent, Red Off the Rails demonstrates McLaughlin's capacity to generate compositional coherence and expressive force from colour alone.

Shadowed Canyon (2024)

Acrylic paint and coloured pencil on unstretched cotton canvas | 36 × 36 in (91.44 × 91.44 cm)

Shadowed Canyon draws its immediate inspiration from the desert mountains of Arizona, specifically from the visual phenomenon of cloud-cast shadows crossing the valleys and hillsides, that transient play of light and dark that transforms the surface of the land into a field of shifting patterns. The work is characterised by gestural brushwork rendered in what McLaughlin describes as a colourful expressionist manner, with Stabilo coloured pencil marks contributing a linear quality that distinguishes this piece from the purely painterly surfaces of others in the portfolio.

The integration of coloured pencil into an acrylic ground is a technically significant decision. Rather than working against the fluidity of the paint, the pencil marks appear to function as a counterpoint, introducing a quality of deliberate, controlled mark-making into a composition otherwise governed by gesture and accident. This dialogue between the drawn and the painted creates a surface of considerable visual complexity.

Thematically, Shadowed Canyon engages with one of McLaughlin's persistent concerns: the capacity of natural light to transform the appearance and emotional character of a landscape. The shadows here are not merely descriptive; they are compositional agents, producing the "stunning patterns" that, in McLaughlin's account, constitute the painting's generative impulse. The square canvas, in the same format as Red Off the Rails, gives the image a concentrated, self-contained quality suited to the painting's meditative subject.

Creek Crossing (2024)

Acrylic paint on unstretched cotton canvas | 40 × 40 in (101.6 × 101.6 cm)

Creek Crossing originated in a winter backpacking trip through the Superstition Mountains of Arizona, a landscape defined, in the colder months, by active watercourses and the vivid geological colour of the rocky terrain. The painting translates the experience of traversing multiple water crossings into a gestural abstraction in which, as McLaughlin describes it, "vibrant colour and brushwork recall the vivid rocks and tumbling waters."

This emphasis on recall rather than reproduction is central to understanding the work. Creek Crossing does not attempt to document a specific location or moment; it seeks instead to transmit the sensory and emotional character of an encounter with a particular kind of landscape. The tumbling quality of water, its energy, its movement, the way it catches and refracts light, is conveyed through the dynamism of the brushwork rather than through mimetic representation.

The square format again serves to concentrate the painting's energy, and the absence of a clearly defined horizon prevents the composition from resolving into conventional landscape topography. The result is a work that operates simultaneously as a landscape allusion and as a formal investigation of colour and gesture, a balance that is characteristic of McLaughlin's most resolved paintings.

Landscape with Orange Bottle (2023)

Acrylic paint on unstretched cotton canvas | 30 × 24 in (76.2 × 60.96 cm)

Landscape with Orange Bottle introduces an art-historical register that situates McLaughlin's practice within a broader European modernist tradition. The composition in which an orange bottle stands beside a vase of poppies against "a colourful background of undulating hills" acknowledges an explicit debt to Pierre Bonnard, the Post-Impressionist painter whose mastery of chromatic orchestration and treatment of domestic and garden motifs as vehicles for sensory intensity remains a touchstone of modern painterly practice.

The Bradshaw Mountains of Prescott, Arizona, provide the landscape component of the composition, but the structural logic of the work, the placement of objects in the foreground against an expansive, painterly ground, draws on a still-life tradition that predates McLaughlin's direct experience of place. The orange bottle functions not merely as an object but as a chromatic anchor, its saturated hue rhyming with and activating the surrounding colour field.

At 30 × 24 inches, Landscape with Orange Bottle is the smallest work in the portfolio. The reduced format is appropriate to its subject: this is an intimate painting, concerned with the relationship between interior and exterior, still life and landscape, the cultivated and the wild. It rewards close looking, and its smaller scale invites a more personal, private form of engagement than the larger works in the series.

Travels Over Water (2024)

Acrylic on unstretched cotton canvas | 36 × 54 in (91.44 × 137.16 cm)

Travels Over Water is the largest horizontal work in the portfolio, and its dimensions, 36 × 54 inches, are well-suited to the expansiveness of its subject. McLaughlin describes it as "a fanciful and colourful depiction of dreamlike watery travels, over bridges, in boats, whatever you may imagine," and the deliberate openness of that invitation signals the work's position at the more imaginative end of her representational spectrum.

Where many of McLaughlin's paintings are anchored in specific topographic experience, a particular mountain range, a specific water crossing, a named canyon,  Travels Over Water operates at the level of archetype. Water, as a traversed medium, as a site of passage and reverie, is a recurrent motif in world culture; McLaughlin deploys it here not to invoke any particular body of water but to explore the emotional texture of water-based movement, the sense of being carried, of existing temporarily between fixed points.

The "energetic expressionist style" in which the painting is executed ensures that this reverie does not become passive. The surface is active, the brushwork kinetic, the colour field presumably combining the blues and greens associated with water with the warmer hues of sky and earth, vibrant and assertive. As a statement piece capable of animating an entire wall, Travels Over Water demonstrates McLaughlin's command of large-scale composition.

Blue Vase with Empty Bottle (2024)

Acrylic on unstretched cotton canvas | 50 × 54 in (127 × 137.16 cm)

Blue Vase with Empty Bottle is the largest work in the portfolio and one of the most conceptually layered. Described by McLaughlin as "a fanciful tabletop still life abstraction," it operates in a register that oscillates between the quotidian and the metaphorical. The "gestural brushwork and bright colours" that bring "a sense of innate energy to the scene" are characteristic of the artist's mature practice, but the compositional premise objects on a surface, sky or clouds above opens onto a range of interpretative possibilities.

McLaughlin herself notes that the scene "may be an outdoor picnic, with clouds skimming above, or possibly a metaphor for a life well-lived." This openness to multiple readings is not evasion but a deliberate feature of the work's design. The empty bottle, in particular, carries a weight of implication: it has contained something that is now absent; it exists as a form defined by what it no longer holds. Against the blue vase, presumably floral, vital, the empty bottle introduces a note of reflective counterpoint.

At over four feet in height and nearly four and a half feet in width, Blue Vase with Empty Bottle operates as an architectural presence within an interior space. Its scale ensures that the still-life subject matter does not read as domestic or modest, but as a substantial statement about the relationship between objects, space, and the passage of time.

Wonderland (2021)

Acrylic on unstretched cotton canvas | 54 × 38 in (137.16 × 96.52 cm)

Wonderland is the earliest work in the portfolio, completed in 2021, and it occupies a distinctive tonal position within McLaughlin's ArtRewards collection. Where many of her other paintings are characterised by chromatic vibrancy and energetic mark-making, Wonderland is described as employing "complex muted tones",  a chromatic restraint that aligns with the work's stated subject: "a sensation of peaceful wonder as light filters through a natural ceiling of intriguing shapes."

The "natural ceiling" to which McLaughlin refers suggests a canopy of some kind, branches, foliage, and rock formations overhead through which light passes, filtered and transformed. This is a classic motif in the Western landscape tradition, from the forest interior paintings of the Barbizon school to the atmospheric woodland works of Emily Carr. McLaughlin approaches it through the vocabulary of gestural abstraction, allowing the forms to remain suggestive rather than specific.

The work's vertical orientation, taller than it is wide at 54 × 38 inches, reinforces the sense of an upward gaze, of space extending above the viewer rather than across the horizon. The "expressionistic brushwork" retains the physical vitality characteristic of McLaughlin's practice, but the muted palette introduces a quiet quality that distinguishes Wonderland from the more aggressively coloured works in the collection. It is among the most contemplative paintings she has placed on the platform.

Cumulus and the Wildfire (2022)

Acrylic on unstretched cotton canvas | 48 × 44 in (121.92 × 111.76 cm)

Cumulus and the Wildfire is the most explicitly topical work in McLaughlin's ArtRewards portfolio, produced during the summer of 2022 when, as she notes, hundreds of wildfires were burning across the western United States. The work depicts "a fanciful, dreamlike version of a sky filled with clouds, smoke and sparks from a wildfire", a subject that carries considerable contemporary resonance without reducing the painting to documentary reportage.

The choice to render this subject in a "fanciful, dreamlike" manner is significant. McLaughlin does not approach the wildfire as a catastrophe to be documented but as a visual and atmospheric phenomenon to be experienced and transmuted. Cumulus clouds and smoke share formal qualities; both are masses of suspended material, subject to the same forces of wind and thermal dynamics, and the painting appears to explore that formal kinship, treating the sky as a field in which the natural and the destructive intermingle.

At 48 × 44 inches, the work is substantial in scale, commensurate with its atmospheric subject. The near-square format prevents the painting from functioning as a conventional landscape, maintaining instead the sense of an immersive sky-field rather than a view across the land. The title's conjunction "Cumulus and the Wildfire" is instructive: it frames the relationship between cloud and fire as coexistence rather than conflict, a reading that is both formally and ecologically resonant.

Professional Practice and Exhibition History

McLaughlin's professional practice has been sustained across an unusually broad range of contexts. For thirty-five years, she held full-time employment as a locomotive engineer with BNSF Railway, a demanding occupation that required her to accommodate painting within the margins of a schedule structured by external obligations. That she continued to develop a coherent and ambitious body of work throughout this period is a testament to the discipline and commitment with which she has approached her practice.

Her exhibition history includes a substantial number of juried shows, through which she achieved early recognition and sales. Notable among these is the acquisition of one of her paintings by Microsoft at the Bellevue Arts and Crafts Festival at the Bellevue Art Museum, a sale that signals the commercial and institutional credibility her work has commanded. She has also participated in museum-style art fairs and open studio tours, formats she has favoured over conventional gallery representation.

McLaughlin has maintained a working studio presence at multiple locations, including a studio in Tacoma where she participated in the Art at Work Open Studios for seven consecutive years. At the time of writing, she is transitioning to a new studio at the 6th Street Business Park in Prescott, Arizona, where she will be working alongside ten other practising artists,  an arrangement she anticipates will expand both her professional network and her engagement with local audiences.

Community Engagement and Broader Contributions

McLaughlin holds an expansive view of visual art's role in contemporary culture, one that extends well beyond the boundaries of fine art to encompass photography, film, commercial and product design, architecture, and any human-made object with aesthetic dimension. Within this broader framework, she positions the handmade painting as a specific and valuable form: irreducible to algorithmic generation, directly linked to a human maker's sensory and emotional experience, and capable of providing a form of respite and reconnection that other cultural forms cannot replicate.

Her community engagement has ranged from visiting artist residencies in local schools to creating art for Centre Camp kiosks at Burning Man,  the counterculture festival and temporary arts community held annually in the Nevada desert. These diverse engagements reflect a pragmatic and inclusive approach to public art practice: a willingness to bring creative work into non-traditional contexts and to engage with audiences beyond the conventional gallery-going public.

The encounter McLaughlin recounts from an art fair in San Francisco, in which a group of young visitors responded to her paintings with the observation that they evoked childhood feelings, encapsulates, in its way, the central ambition of her practice. So too does the response of the older woman who moved silently through her exhibition, applauding each work in turn. These are not merely anecdotes; they are evidence of the communicative range that McLaughlin's paintings can achieve.

Reflection and Future Directions

Now retired from her thirty-five-year career on the railway, McLaughlin has access to working conditions she describes as more conducive to sustained creative development than any she has previously experienced. The freed time has allowed her to remain longer in the early, exploratory phases of a painting, the stages of indeterminacy and possibility that she regards as the most generative and the results, she suggests, have been a practice that is simultaneously freer and more spontaneous than the work produced under the time pressures of a dual career.

Her ongoing preoccupation remains the tension between the abstract and the representational landscape, a formal and conceptual challenge that resists resolution and therefore continues to generate productive work. She writes of anticipating further evolution without specifying its direction, approaching the future of her practice with the same openness and receptivity she brings to an individual canvas.

McLaughlin is candid about the difficulty of assessing one's own impact as a painter. She acknowledges that painting's cultural relevance is contested and subject to ongoing negotiation. What she is clear about is painting's function as a personal and communicative act, a means of visiting the unknown, of materialising thought and feeling, and of offering those materialisations to others who may find in them something of value.

Conclusion

Nancy J. McLaughlin's practice represents a sustained and disciplined engagement with the expressive possibilities of gestural painting in the tradition of American and Canadian abstract landscape art. Her works, rooted in direct experience of the natural world and informed by a carefully considered lineage of artistic influence, operate at the intersection of the seen and the felt, the specific and the universal, the physical landscape and the perceptual states it induces.

The eight paintings currently available on her ArtRewards profile demonstrate the range of her practice: from the pure chromatic abstraction of Red Off the Rails to the meditative stillness of Wonderland, from the topical urgency of Cumulus and the Wildfire to the art-historical layering of Landscape with Orange Bottle. Taken together, they constitute a coherent body of work unified by a consistent set of formal concerns and a recognisable pictorial sensibility.

To view Nancy J. McLaughlin's complete portfolio, including all works currently available for acquisition, visit her profile at ArtRewards.