A Smile for the Living

The Life of Nancy Fenton

Nancy Fenton holding a biography of her father, Australian artist Percy Leason.

At 103 years old, Nancy Fenton laughs when she's asked how she's lived so long. “I don't know why,” she says. “I call myself a freak of nature.” But talk with her for even a few minutes, and it becomes clear that longevity is the least interesting thing about her. Nancy has spent her life making things — paintings, hand-knit toys, a family — and giving most

of it away.

Nancy was born November 30, 1922, in Sydney, Australia, the fourth of six children. Her father was Percy Leason, a noted Australian artist and political cartoonist whose tonalist paintings and long-running “Wiregrass” cartoon series made him one of the country's best-known commercial artists in the 1920s and '30s. Her mother taught piano. In the Leason household, art wasn't a hobby you tried out — it was simply what you did. “It kind of helped us along,” Nancy says of her father's influence. He didn't believe in sending his children off to school for lessons; he preferred to teach them at home. “It didn't hurt us,” she says, matter-of-factly.

A portrait of Isabel Leason — Nancy's mother — painted by Percy Leason.

The family lived in a large house in the Australian countryside, where music and painting filled ordinary days. Nancy remembers being taken to concerts and meeting well-known artists as a child, and working alongside her father, who often let his children sit in on his classes. Every one of the Leason children went on to find some creative outlet of their own — painting, music, or both. Nancy chose to paint, in oil and watercolor, and started knitting when she was in the third grade — a skill she still practices today.

Crossing an Ocean

At 16, Nancy left Australia when her family moved to America. Percy Leason relocated the family to New York in 1938, where he continued his art career and found work illustrating for magazines of the day. The move, Nancy says, is one of the great adventures of her life.

Nancy with “Wiregrass: A Mythical Australian Town,” a collection of her father's newspaper cartoons.

It was back in the United States, in her own backyard, that Nancy met her husband, Howard. It was wartime, and Howard kept a “victory garden” — the small home vegetable plots so many Americans grew during World War II. His garden happened to back up to hers. They married in 1947, when Nancy was 25, and she became a U.S. citizen that same year. Together they raised four children: Nancy, Barbara, Kathy,and Mike. New York's damp climate wasn't good for her young son's health, and a doctor recommended a change of scenery. The family relocated to Tucson, Arizona.

Nancy and her husband, Howard, at their family farm.

Nancy went on to live in several places over the decades — Arizona, El Cajon, and later a home near Ross Lake in the De Luz area of Fallbrook, where she lived for about fifteen years with her son. She painted throughout, often taking a photograph of a scene and returning to it later with brush in hand.

If she could pick a favorite place she's lived, she says it would be California — or Australia. She returned to Australia once, around the 1990s, to visit cousins she'd never met. “When you got one cousin, you got other cousins,” she says. “You had to meet them all.” She never

made it back a second time, and there is still a wish list: she and her sister always meant to climb the great red-rock formation at the center of the country, and never did. She's always wanted to see England, too. Neither trip happened — life, marriage, and children got in the way, she says, without a trace of regret in her voice.

The Hardest Chapter

Ask Nancy about her greatest happiness, and she doesn't hesitate: her family. Ask about her deepest sorrow, and she doesn't hesitate there either.

Her granddaughter Vanessa, Barbara's daughter, was born with a rare condition, discovered by an English doctor, that kept her small — Nancy describes her as “a miniature person,” fully aware, sharp, and full of personality, right down to knowing the make of every car on the road. For about ten years, Nancy was her regular weekend babysitter. “It kept me young,” she says now. “We saw the value in her life.”

Vanessa died as a child at a children's hospital. It remains, Nancy says, the hardest thing she's ever lived through. She believes her presence in Vanessa's life gave her daughter Barbara something Barbara couldn't always give herself in that season — comfort, and someone to help carry it. It's a theme that repeats throughout Nancy's life: showing up for people, quietly, in the ways that are needed most.

What She Made, What She Gave Away

Nancy's paintings hang in family homes, in a local history museum, and, in one case, on the wall of a gallery in a country far from where she now lives — a source, she admits, of real pride. She paints in both oil and watercolor, often working from a photograph she took herself — an old fishing boat and a glacier she once saw in Alaska, a covered bridge in autumn color, and the neighbors she walked with every morning around the lake near her former home.

Nancy with her painting of an old boat, inspired by a trip to Alaska.

Nancy's painting of neighbors on their morning walk around the lake near her former home.

One of Nancy's watercolor paintings.

Her father's legacy looms even larger: Percy Leason studied under the realist painter Max Meldrum and became known for his portraits, cartoons, and, later in his career, a significant series of portraits of Aboriginal Australians at Lake Tyers, Victoria — work now held in Australian public collections. One of his early paintings, depicting explorers crossing the Australian interior, hangs in a gallery today. “You know, those poor explorers, what they went through,” Nancy says. “They just took off and didn't know what was on the other side.”

A print of one of Percy Leason's early paintings, depicting explorers crossing the Australian outback, hanging in Nancy's room today.

Two portraits from Percy Leason's acclaimed 1934 series depicting Aboriginal Australians at Lake Tyers, Victoria.

She kept painting into her early 100s, stopping only about a year ago, and continues to knit. For years she made small hand-knit toys — including, memorably, a run of Minions, inspired by the animated movie characters — and sold them for a few dollars apiece at a farm stand. The money was never really the point. “It was just to see the way the children loved them,” she says.

Giving things away, in fact, seems to be one of the great pleasures of Nancy's life. She recalls a group of caregivers who once admired a large painting she'd made from a photograph taken in France — one she says she could have sold for real money. Instead, she gave it to one of them on the spot. “She was in seventh heaven,” Nancy says. “I just felt so good... I probably would have just trashed it, you know? It just does something in your heart.”

On a Long Life

Nancy has outlived nearly everyone she once knew, and has strong, clear-eyed opinions about the world her great-grandchildren are inheriting. She worries about how much of modern life happens on screens, and has watched, with some dismay, as technology — especially artificial intelligence — has upended fields like the arts, where two of her granddaughters built careers. Still, she's hopeful for them: genuine artistic skill and vision, she believes, will only grow more valuable as the novelty of AI wears off.

Asked for one final piece of wisdom after 103 years, Nancy doesn't offer platitudes. She offers a small, plainspoken creed: “A smile for the living is better than a thousand tears for the dead.” She has watched families struggle to let loved ones go, watched the toll it takes on everyone left holding on too tightly, and she has made her peace with the alternative — meeting whatever time is left with a smile instead of dread.

She insists she doesn't understand why she's lived so long, or so well — “a freak of nature,” in her own words. But her family, her art, and everyone she has quietly cared for over a century would likely tell her otherwise: it isn't an accident. It's a life built, brushstroke by brushstroke and stitch by stitch, on paying attention to the people around her, and giving away whatever she had left to give.

Nancy Fenton currently lives at a Senior Home in Fallbrook and turns 104 this

November.