Once thought of as a superhero for fighting the evils of drugs, Nancy is now better recognized as an artist whose work has graced all the major galleries from the S.M.U. in Beverly Hills to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the MOMA in New York. It was the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Arts that chose to honor her in 1987 with an exhibition entitled From Street Artist to Superstar: The Art of Nancy Spero. The retrospective is now on tour through museums in America and Europe in cooperation with the U.S. Embassy and the French Cultural Services. The subject of her 1992 film "Nancy," the New York artist is also the subject of new musical compositions by Michael Giacchino, the Academy Award-winning music director and composer of The Incredibles and Mission:Impossible 3. Together with composer David Koechlin, he will compose an orchestral work for piano, orchestra and chorus based on her text "Cello Prelude and Fanfare" as well as a suite for string orchestra, piano and percussion, "Cello Fantasies and Fugues," for the release of her CD Cello Fantasies on Bravura Records. Spero and her husband, the painter Stephen Greene (the third in a line of notable artists of this name), live in New York City with their son, Leo. She continues to do public appearances on the art circuit as well as private shows for her personal friends in the New York City area. This essay originally appeared in Art of Time Present: New York’s Annual New Talent Show, a show that she curated in 2001. You can see and purchase her work at her web site here. Baltimore is my second home. I live there permanently, I come here often, and I go to art schools there. In 1985, when I had to take the decision whether I should study design and then paint seriously or go to art school, I couldn’t make a choice. There were so many good reasons for this: it was an international city that I loved, where artists of all ages, cultures, and origins and of all levels were flourishing. Here it was really not fashionable to do art just for the love of art but more for the love of art as a business. My father being an architect and my mother being a sculptor, I felt that both of them would understand my decision, so they were not pressuring me into the choice of either an architect or an art director. My father felt that my decision to paint was a wise decision and that he would support me in any way he could, so long as I wasn’t doing what I wasn’t good at. His favorite phrase was “If you can’t be good at it, don’t be in it.” He thought that if I was only a painter, I would soon run out of money and I might even starve to death. But because I was studying painting, he was able to finance my art school studies. The design school that I wanted to enter was not an easy choice for me, for the reason that the school that I thought I could do art in was about to close because it had no money. So instead of going there, I studied painting in the college of fine arts of Rome in Italy where I spent eight years studying drawing, painting, and sculpture. This was a very interesting period in my life. During this time I developed a special interest in the relationship between nature and art and the place of nature in the art of my time. Although my painting at this time was basically figurative, it had more of a connection to the nature of the human body rather than the nature of the art in the sense that it had much in common with surrealism. My interest in landscape changed, and after this I spent more time on landscapes and became more interested in landscape. This was especially true during a period when I was living in Israel. The paintings that I made during this time were very much related to the natural environment of my country. However, when I moved back to New York, the paintings lost their connection to the landscape of my country. While I was in Israel, I developed an interest in the landscapes of that country. In fact, when I began to explore landscape seriously, I did not think of it as landscape but as something about nature that is universal. My interest in painting had to do with the way it represented a connection between man and nature, how it could show and represent the interaction between them. And to some extent the art of this time was my attempt to find an alternative to my earlier way of making paintings. Because of my interest in nature and its connection to a specific place, I feel that I have been influenced by the abstract expressionism of the thirties, though I had never been an artist who was influenced by this kind of art. Since this time, I have been interested in painting. Now I paint mostly landscapes and try to understand nature in its deepest sense. In fact, all of my recent works have one thing in common: they are based on a concern for nature. The place of nature in my work relates mainly to landscape but not to the landscape as a specific image, as if the nature of the landscape is an abstraction of nature as a human experience. My landscape usually has a romantic element, but not a romantic atmosphere. This does not mean that this romantic aspect is lost or that there is no connection to the actual physical space. In fact, this is very much related to its physical space and even creates an experience for the spectator, because the actual physical space is related to the spiritual space and our vision of the world is limited to our space. And my paintings explore the spiritual aspect of my relationship to the physical space and try to represent a new view of this space. As my painting evolved, I found myself in an area between painting and architecture. This area of not being able to say what it was was a very interesting experience for me, especially since most of my time was spent painting buildings. At the same time, there was a moment in my life when I went to a friend’s house, and as I walked in, I felt that something happened in this place. I sensed something from this place, and the fact that I could relate this to nature is important for me. At this point, I have an overwhelming desire for nature. Now that I have painted for many years, the desire to paint continues to be a very important aspect of my life. It influences my painting