Valerie Nichol an exciting artist in southern Ontario whose paintings are just heartstoppingly gorgeous. Making her art as what you would call abstract in acrylics and gels, she conveys the emotion she experiences in her world of nature directly. Here I have no need for words. I can find almost no use of words to describe them. Her paintings themselves say everything needed to say. A quote from William Wordsworth written in 1802 conveys the message, “and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils”
Her own description:
“I’m attracted to textures – tree bark, earth, snow and rock formations, water surfaces, waves, ripples, frost patterns…
I love movement – movement as in a piece of music that builds to a climax and falls away. Movement as in rolling clouds and waves.
I’m fascinated by the passage of time – that we come from somewhere unknown anddisappear into the unknown. I did a series of paintings that I called ‘life Cycles’ which were white around the edges and danced with colour in the centre. There is such mystery to life. I love the way fog hangs over the water and the earth creating a white mysterious veil over the known landscape.
I love the play of light – how it emerges out of a cloud formation or reflects on the water. I love color, sunsets, sunrises.. Often I mix my paint very thin and use it as a wash across the canvas. It puddles in the cracks and crevices of the texture I’ve used.
There’s nothing more exciting that a deep rich wet colour flowing over the white canvas. I use acrylic gel to re-create that wet look once the painting is finished.
All of these thoughts appear and re-appear in my art work. Someone wrote about Gerald Manley Hopkins’ ‘Inscapes’- “He understood the visual image to be reflexive, both a window on the world and a mirror of the created and creative self”.
In an age where technology is constantly advancing – where computers and logic control our lives, I choose to paint in a totally intuitive style. One layer of colour and texture leads to the next and each piece is an adventure. My paintings are a celebration of the earth and its great mystery.”
Listen to my interview with Valerie in the following slideshow clips:
How Started, Media-theme
Evolving
Marketing
Living in Art
Some web sites with her art you will be delighted to visit:
https://www.art-in-guelph.com/Pages/ValerieNichol.html
filed under Artist Bios - Canvassing the Artists, Featured.
