Adorning the scuffed covers of long-forgotten ledgers, Nancy Rose Taplin’s delicate paintings of birds evoke both transience and timelessness. The foxed and blotted surfaces provide an almost topographical habitat that Nancy feels only right to populate with birds.
Nancy was born in 1980, the daughter of sculptor Guy Taplin, and ceramicist Robina Jack. She began painting in 2010, and since then she has become increasingly absorbed in the process. She recently moved from the Essex coast to London, where she is enjoying producing new work in her studio in Hackney.
Nancy says, “When I first started painting, I used photos as a reference guide, but as I’ve become more confident my work’s taken on a stylised element, a sort of refined reality. I still love to watch birds though, to get a sense of their personalities. It never fails to surprise me how birds’ characters seem to vary from species to species, and I try to capture something of this in my paintings. Dad’s obsession with the natural world has definitely rubbed off on me.”
