"Beyond Words" an Art Sale and Showcase Featuring Nancy Junkin

About this event

“Beyond Words” is on view through January 29th, 2027 and opens with an artist reception on Thursday, November 5th from 5 PM to 7 PM at BancFirst Tower Underground Gallery at 100 N. Broadway Ave. OKC, OK. 73102. Junkin is best known for figurative and abstract paintings defined by a looseness of expression, line, and color. Her abstracts begin with a movement of line rather than a preconceived plan, a process she compares to starting a jigsaw puzzle: “intriguing, exciting, frustrating and with some successes along the way.” Her figures are just as loose, often painted without facial features so that each carries a kind of universal gaze. Color, whether faded or bold, cool or warm, textured or luminous, sits at the center of both.

“In my studio, anything that can make a mark is fair game,” Junkin says. Her tools range from pencils and kitchen utensils to sticks from a pine forest and shells from the beach, and her elegant Japanese brushes to hardware-store finds. She builds the surface in layers, veiling areas and adding shapes and lines until the composition gains history and depth, often adding collage (words, scraps of paper, fragments of earlier paintings) as details emerge.

Junkin came to painting midlife by way of a recurring dream in which she wandered her house and found an unfamiliar room. A dream interpretation book read it as the sign of “a quiet spirit waiting to be developed,” and she followed it with restless determination: painting daily, taking classes and workshops, studying with a range of artists, building a library around favorites such as Matisse, Joan Mitchell, Fechin, and Diebenkorn, and visiting museums in London, Amsterdam, Belgium, Istanbul, and across the United States. Emotion, history, weather, and the landscape of her home in the heart of the country all shape the work. “Painting is my way of expressing a love for life that is even better than a dream,” she says.