An oyster tonger stands on the starboardside of his fishing boat and raises his tongs out of the water in the oil-on-canvas painting The Young Tonger by Nancy Tankersley. Bold strokes of blue are highlighted with light yellows and whites, proposing sparkling sunspots on the water. Red buckets for the harvested oysters sit in and on the outboard-powered boat. In the distance, larger boats work the water, the warm sun illuminating the entire scene and wrapping the tonger and his boat in a dreamy glow.
Born and raised in the mid-Atlantic, Tankersley spent much of her youth on the bustling waterways of Annapolis, Maryland, exploring with family. Before she was a teen, it was evident that Tankersley had a knack for painting figurative portraits, so she honed her craft until college, when she attended the University of Miami in Ohio. During the 1960s however, the university had become a bit too relaxed in its curriculum to offer Tankersley the arts education she desired. Ultimately, she switched universities and pursued a degree in social work, only circling back to painting in her late thirties after marriage and children.
On an early fall day, Tankersley and her husband were boating on the Chesapeake Bay when they came across almost 50 tongers. It was opening day of tonger season on the Chesapeake, so Tankersley whipped out her camera to capture the scene. “It was a little bit of serendipity,” said the artist when we spoke over the phone. “I kind of put the scene together, you know. That [The Young Tonger] was an actual waterman. Thus, the painting was born through a combination of real-life experience, photography and a little imagination.”
Tankersley also paints plein air, a method which brings her even closer to a scene she wants to capture. “The more I did it, the more I saw the value in painting on location,” she said. Through these methods, her paintings evoke the same feelings that a field of flowers painted by Renoir might; they are full of light and almost alive in color and detail. These days, Tankersley works both in and outside her studio, but for the most part, she is happy to paint wherever.
“I just love it,” she said. “I’ve been at an age now where a lot of my contemporaries are spending most of their time doing crossword puzzles. There’s nothing wrong with crossword puzzles, but I feel very fortunate that I can go into my studio every day and lose myself in a new project.”
This story was originally published in the June 2024 issue.
