The portraits of a lady

Decades in seclusion. A mysterious spouse. With her work in a new exhibit, a painter reemerges.

Top: Nancy Ellen Craig holds her painting ''Apollo Rising From the Ashes'' in front of her home, which burned in March. Center: Craig stands between her portraits of Frank Lloyd Wright (left) and Hans Hofmann. Bottom: Working with a model in the 1950s. (Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff (top and center))

TRURO - The yellow house at the bottom of the steep, rutted dirt driveway is empty now. An electrical fire in March rendered the small Cape a charred shell, littered with ruined clothes, water-stained books, and childhood photographs. The garage, though, remains intact. And Nancy Ellen Craig, a tiny 81-year-old woman wearing a borrowed rugby shirt and shorts, pulls open the door as she does most things, with a bounce and giggle.

Inside, she tugs at giant canvases piled five, six deep like stacked chairs. They tower over her 5-foot-1-inch frame, some wobbling as they scrape across the concrete floor. Each one reveals another layer of her artistic life: There are her dark, conceptual paintings inspired by real-world events, as well as the many portraits for which she was once acclaimed, including an enormous 8-by-9-foot likeness of Norman Mailer in the early 1970s, his intense gaze set off by thick, graying hair.

"Some of these I haven't seen for ages," Craig says, pausing only to pull out another work.

One sprawling canvas inspired by the Abu Ghraib scandal shows naked prisoners piled three deep, calmly observed by a row of seated sketch artists. Another painting depicts the smoking Twin Towers, with the Greek god Apollo ascending into the sky. That work and three others by Craig will be at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown through Oct. 12 as part of a group show, "Yes We Can! (The HOPE Factor)." (A portion of the sale proceeds will be donated to Barack Obama's presidential campaign.)

It's fitting that Craig's canvases are seeing the light of day now, just as she herself is emerging from decades of withdrawal from the public. For all those years her focus was her husband - an apparently brilliant, mysterious, and reclusive man who, in many ways, pulled her away from the outside world.

This house was their sanctuary, where Craig cooked, gardened, and, in the garage, painted. Sometimes people stopped by, but rarely were they invited in. Preston Carter, her husband, preferred it that way. Over the years, the two grew increasingly isolated. They kept others at arm's length - everyone from their neighbors to Craig's own two sons from her first marriage. She didn't talk to them for 46 years.

Carter's sudden death a year ago, perhaps from a heart attack, changed that. Craig has ventured into the world, reaching out to local people and calling her children.

"She has burst forth," says Diana Worthington, a Truro resident whose casual friendship with Craig intensified in the months after Carter's death. "She didn't need other connections before. Yet the moment that Preston died, she was on the phone all the time making new friends."

Craig, who swims daily and looks at least a decade younger than she is, says she had no choice.

"I opened up because I had to," she said. "The few people I knew I contacted. I'm basically rather gregarious."

Bohemian rhapsody

When she met Preston Carter in the 1950s, Nancy Craig was already a celebrated painter. Established as a master portraitist in New York, she would go on to paint Frank Lloyd Wright, Tyrone Power, Anjelica Huston, and various members of the Forbes family. Photographs from her early years show Craig stylishly dressed in gowns or tailored suits, standing next to her portraits at gallery openings.

In a small rented house near her burned-out home, Craig sits on a couch, legs pulled up under her, laughing as she talks about her younger days. Looking at a 1948 clipping from The New York Times of the wedding announcement for her first marriage, she concedes it was a mistake: Five weeks after the 19-year-old former debutante from Bronxville, N.Y., married a onetime Navy man and moved to Pittsburgh, she headed back home and got a divorce. It was around that time that Craig, largely untrained, began to paint.

"I could always draw," says Craig. "It was easy for me. Like breathing."

Within a few years, she had married a Wall Street lawyer, Merlin Nelson, and developed a profitable career as a portraitist. Her first child, Craig Nelson, arrived in 1955, and a second son, Brian, in 1958. She didn't know what to do with the boys, who were largely looked after by a nanny.

"I didn't dislike them," says Craig. "I just didn't want to take care of them."

By now, Craig had earned notice in The New York Times, which praised her in a 1955 review for demonstrating "considerable psychological insight" and "so individualizing her subjects that her work rises well above the level of conventional portrait painting." In 1957, the National Academy of Design awarded her the $1,500 Benjamin Altman prize for figures.

That same year she met Carter through a friend of her brother. Four years younger, he was also from Bronxville. She painted him the next year, and realized she was in love with him in 1959.

"Pres," as she called him, had curly shoulder-length hair and blue eyes. He had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth, traded letters with e.e. cummings, and gave every indication that he would fulfill the promise expected of a man of his intellectual standing.

"We all expected great, literary stuff from him," says his sister, Joan Carter Indig, by phone from her home in New Jersey.

"He had a genius IQ, 163," says Craig. "And was brilliant."

Some thought Carter's IQ was even higher: "Preston had an IQ of about 190," says Lord Adrian Foley, a British friend for 40 years, speaking from his home in Spain. "He really should have been a university professor."

After three years of "absolute hell," Craig says, she left her second husband and joined Carter. They were married and began to travel - to Jamaica, England, Spain. They supported themselves through her commissions and often stayed with friends. In 1964, the couple began spending summers on the Cape, where they met such luminaries as John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, and the artist Hans Hofmann. Craig painted a portrait of Hofmann, a work she keeps with her.

"We led a very bohemian life," says Craig. "We were all over. When we were here, our house was like nothing you've seen. Books were piled all over the place. Pres read to me every night."

'Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore'

She loves to swim. Most days, in Truro, Craig bicycles down to the water, jumps in, and swims along the coast. She is such a strong swimmer that in the 1980s, when they were staying with Lord Foley in California, Foley's son Thomas would win money by betting the local boys that she could stay under water longer than they.

Foley, who met the couple through friends in Nassau in 1970, adored them. But he also found them to be strange. When they stayed with him in Spain for a month, he says, "they were terribly untidy. The place was chaos. They also divided their lives into two parts. One of them wouldn't talk on the telephone. The other wouldn't go shopping. It was a funny sort of partnership."

After more than a decade traveling, Craig and Carter settled in Truro for good, first renting then, in 1973, buying a house. From 1967 to 2001, she rented studio space in a barn two miles from the house. After that, she worked out of the garage. In their earlier days on the Cape, they had been social, reveling in their exchanges with Dos Passos and Wilson. As time passed and those older friends died or moved on, they began to keep to themselves.

"He read, he read, he read, he read," Craig says of her husband.

The books became almost consuming. Carter seemed unable to resist them, collecting 10,000 by the time of his death. The books lined the house, threaded through doorways, piled up ceiling high and three rows deep. After a while, entertaining at home was not an option. There was no room. The couple would sit at a small table near the fireplace, surrounded by books, for dinner. Or they might sit on the screened-in porch.

"We'd go to the swap shop, and I kept saying, 'Pres, please take some of these books back.' He'd take 10 back and come home with 30."

Escaping with Carter from her previous life, Craig now painted portraits only when she chose, including a series depicting her husband. Her works grew in size and scope. She painted a group of Expressionistic paintings, black and red images with graphic scenes of women giving birth. She painted works depicting Actaeon, a character in Greek mythology who was torn apart by dogs.

Craig says she exhibited her art only occasionally in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. In the 1990s, Salvatore Del Deo, a local painter, told Provincetown gallery owner Berta Walker about Craig. She visited the Truro studio.

"I was in awe," says Walker. "She's totally unique at what she does and an amazing painter. Those great horse shanks, the strength of the bodies and horses and panthers - she's so talented. But way beyond that, she's got this amazing imagination."

Walker was so impressed that in 1999, she replaced the single doors of her gallery with double doors so she could fit Craig's largest paintings into the space. She has exhibited Craig's work in about five one-person shows and at least 10 group exhibitions. As reluctant as Carter was to let outsiders into his and Craig's lives, he encouraged her artistic endeavors.

Walker was intrigued by the way the couple acted. They drove a black, 1955 Mercedes - originally inherited from Carter's father - until it could no longer pass inspection. They kept driving it even after that for grocery store runs. They had strictly defined roles: Craig cooked, crafting delicate meals out of homemade ingredients. She wouldn't so much as take mayonnaise out of a jar, preferring to whip up her own from egg yolks and olive oil.

Carter never worked, a great source of sadness for his friends and family, all of whom expected great things. He spent much of his time reading. He did all of the food shopping - to the point that after his death, Craig needed a friend to help guide her through the supermarket aisles. Carter also handled the banking. And he suggested they keep to themselves.

When the subject of her sons came up, Carter didn't forbid her from calling them, but he said "he didn't think it was a good idea," Craig recalls. He had the same attitude when a woman moved in next door and was outside gardening. Carter said she "shouldn't get involved" with a neighbor.

That reclusive lifestyle has raised questions with some friends. They've seen Craig, outgoing and full of energy since her husband's death, and can't imagine she chose to keep to herself. Was she under Carter's control?

Walker, the Provincetown gallery owner, says no.

"That love they had was so unusual," says Walker. "They really were so happy just to be with each other. And they didn't care for what we think of as norms - putting away the books as opposed to just piling them up and piling them up. Or she painting, painting, and painting and stacking them up on one another."

In recent weeks, Craig has even heard talk around town that she was "abused" by Carter's controlling ways. She burst into tears.

"It is odd, yes, but it was my choice," Craig says of her secluded life. "I adored him, absolutely adored him. And we sort of lived like Tosca - 'Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore.' I lived for art, and for love."

Reconnecting

She was not prepared for Carter's death. Neither of them went to doctors, so there was no reason to believe he was ill. Just that day, they had followed their typical routine. He read. She painted. They rode down to the beach for her daily swim. They played tennis. After dinner, he said he felt uncomfortable. She didn't realize what was happening until, just before dawn, he had convulsions and died.

After the funeral, some, including Lord Foley, expected she would remain cut off. But she didn't. Craig turned to others, including Worthington, who had commissioned Craig to paint a portrait of her niece, Christa, after the younger woman's murder in 2002. Worthington spent weeks helping Craig organize the house, particularly to sell $30,000 worth of books. This was important as Carter, without Craig's knowledge, had rolled up $70,000 of credit card debt. They had simply been unable to pay their bills.

"I got sucked in there, joyfully," says Worthington. "I sat at the table and couldn't believe the food she served. Little medallions of beef and veal in this divine juice. Everything was cooked to perfection. I was entranced with her." But then Worthington saw Craig's pantry. "It was just appalling, the mess in it," she says. "I asked for permission to pick up the pantry a bit. I think it took four hours a night for four nights."

Not long after Carter's death, Craig decided it was time to contact her sons. First she had to find them. She put in a call to her ex-husband and discovered that one son lived in Japan, the other in New York. Brian Nelson, the younger son, declined to be interviewed for this story. Craig Nelson, 52, a hedge fund manager in Tokyo, admits that there was some skepticism when they first heard from her, out of the blue.

"I think the suspicion may have been, 'Oh, now that her husband's died, she's asking for help,' " he says. "But she isn't."

During a recent visit to Truro, Nelson showed his mother pictures of his sons. He introduced her to his Japanese wife. He had long ago decided to make peace with her.

"I find her delightful, which is nice," he says. "She's extremely energetic. She swims every day in the sea. Her personality is delightful. At the same time, I had a feeling - it was my mother. It was a funny feeling."

Geoff Edgers can be reached atgedgers@globe.com.