For Nancy Nicol, the act of creating is not confined to a single medium or moment. It is, instead, a way of moving through the world—one that began in childhood and continues across painting, sculpture, and assemblage.

“I’ve always been drawing and painting,” she says. “Since I was a little kid.”

Raised in Jersey City but educated in New York City at a school that emphasized both art and hands-on learning, Nicol’s early creative life was shaped by access and independence. Large sheets of paper, tempera paints, and a curriculum that encouraged making—whether through art or tools—offered a formative environment. “Everything was big,” she recalls. “Big paper, big space, and everyone creating together.” When school recessed, summers were spent on the Cape at a home the family owned in Chatham. The local beaches, and woods and pastures of the Lower Cape became her world to explore and inspire.

That sense of exploration has remained central to her work, even as her path unfolded in parallel directions. For more than four decades, Nicol maintained a career as a marriage and family therapist, structuring her time to preserve a steady studio practice. The two disciplines, rather than competing, informed one another.

“I’m the type of person that believes if you do the work, the inspiration will come,” she explains. “Even if you don’t feel like painting, just go be in the studio. Clean your brushes, organize—just be in that space.”

Listening to her heart’s longing, in 1999 she moved to Wellfleet where she is now based. She opened a small gallery, Gallery 5, in her home on East Commercial Street in the heart of the quaint downtown. Nicol draws deeply from the Outer Cape’s landscape—both its physical materials and its quiet rhythms. Her work spans oil and cold wax paintings, mixed media collages, and whimsical sculptural forms, all connected by a spirit of curiosity and play. In 2000 she set up a booth at the Wellfleet Oyster Festival where she sold small paintings of oysters to an entusiastic crowd. Her paintings were so popular she says, “I had to go home the first night and painting a bunch more, the next day people were taking home wet pieces! But they sure were popular!”

Her paintings still return to the natural forms that define the Cape: oysters, shells, and coastal textures rendered with sensitivity to their irregularities and character, and which have become very popular as they have been printed on tote bags, flags and throw pillows that she sells on her website, nancynicolart.com. “They’re very forgiving,” she says of oyster shells. “They have cracks, depth, different colors—they’re all similar, but all different.”

In many compositions, these forms take on a subtle anthropomorphic quality—paired shells appearing to lean toward one another, as if in quiet conversation. It is a reflection, perhaps, of Nicol’s lifelong attentiveness to relationship, whether between people or materials.

Even her frames tell a story. Constructed by hand using repurposed wood—often weathered snow fencing—they echo her early training with tools and her ongoing commitment to making from what is available.

“I don’t use power tools,” she notes with a laugh. “Just a hammer, a pull saw, and nails.”

For Nicol, the throughline is clear: a life shaped by creativity, independence, and an openness to discovery. “I paint every day” she says of her work which remains rooted in that same spirit of exploration—where materials speak, relationships emerge, and the act of making becomes its own quiet form of understanding.   

Nancy Nicol is represented by ArtNova in Chatham. Her work can also be seen at Frying Pan Gallery in both Orleans and Wellfleet.

~Julie Craven Wagner