Nancy Acheson Rohrer (1924 – 2013) was an American painter and illustrator active in southern Ohio from 1970 to 2010.
Nancy grew up during the Depression in Pittsburgh, daughter of a Presbyterian minister turned teacher and a high school librarian. Her early interest and talent in art were discouraged by her practical-minded father.
She first studied art as a student at Muskingum College in Ohio, where she earned a BA in psychology in 1946, and at a commercial art school, hoping to support herself as an illustrator. By 1948 she had found work as a secretary at an Ohio State University psychology clinic, where she met her future husband, James Rohrer. For the next two decades she was a full-time wife and mother of three.
Only in the 1970s, after her mother died and as her children left home, did her full attention return to painting. Nancy set up a studio in the basement of her Cincinnati home, studied with area teachers, and later earned her MFA from Miami University in nearby Oxford, OH.
Painting in oil and acrylics became her primary focus. She worked also with watercolor, pastels and collage. Her subjects included studio models, landscapes, still life compositions and portraits of family members; her scenes became increasingly abstract. She entered local shows, sold some work, and, by then in her fifties, for the first time felt she had a supportive arts community.
Nancy’s productive years through 2010 yielded more than 180 artworks, most of which are catalogued here. In her personal notebook “The Journey,” compiled in the years before her death in 2013, she grouped her work into four stages, beginning with early portraits and figures, then exploration of light and shadow, followed by color and movement, and finally “Abstracts and Ideas.”