I want to thank all of my readers of this blog over the last few years. I am moving it over to Tumblr now, which is visually more appealing to me and allows for more interesting community.
I appreciate my subscribers for their support.
Please come join me at:
http://your-kimberlynichols-love.tumblr.com
Also, my new art and writing website is up!
http://www.kimberlynicholsstudio.com
Thank you!
Kimberly
I am currently absorbed in a piece about the unchanging elements that make up the perpetual cycle of relationship: elation, explosion and expansion. I love poking holes in the cardboard. I realize that I am poking holes that may not be filled with yarn but may allow the viewer to see a little bit of light coming from the backside. Some holes may be filled with string, little flimsy bits. The idea is to show matter exploding from intense emotion—the intense emotion that disturbs an assumed or familiar calm that stems from the original bliss point of a new relationship. The first time this happens, it is devastating. But as the cycle repeats in relationship eternally, one understands that explosions are necessary to jostle the matter and that new matter eventually forms and that this trinity is necessary to keep a relationship growing and fresh—non static. My studio work takes place in my domestic setting, squeezed in among life with my partner. There is something in that—something about being a woman and the traditional roles of women, where we have to shove things in between other things to get them done. I am not necessarily in a traditional role as a female or an artist. I am not domestic. I work in a small-contained office or sprawled around the house. My life is my studio. I also like working on the couch with my thimble as if in matron mode darning a sock. This Betsy-Ross metaphor is new to me but I realize that much of what I am doing now is trying to express emotion and the human condition by patch-working together the raw materials that are available to me within the current limitations of my life: cardboard that is readily available from household purchases, yarn and sewing tools, fabrics that I have compiled that represent color, bits of built up paint from palette bowls—accessible items that stem from my need to create while fiscally lean and my desire to use primal, rudimentary, naïve elements in conjunction with my self-schooled voice. Ironic that I am going backwards into found substances and cast offs as I grow sophisticated in my concepts. There is no competition for resources but only the opportunities to give birth to ideas.
My world used to be big and large and contained hardly enough space for me. Today it is honed like a smartly sharp pinpoint where specks dance from things only accessed by deep looking. Like when wood is rent by bench saw to reveal the marvelous last supper of termites within. Material bleached white by the intrusion of predators – the shock noticeable on the skin carrying fantastic new whorls. Disease to one begets the evolution that occurs from dis-ease to another. What was once a fence post now delivers a pattern to an artist – a juxtaposition of young and golden thriving beauty next to a ransacked body – poignant and flayed for new truthful undertakings and a second life as something strikingly beautiful.
In the very early 2000s while I was struggling with my own identity as an artist I met a man who deeply touched my soul. My struggles were based on the fact that most of my work up until that point had been directly autobiographical – a process that was largely cathartic but that had propelled me to a new place of healing where I no longer needed to so deeply examine my individual experience. In this healing space, I became largely haunted by the disconnection of human beings from each other in the world, separated by divergent politics and ideologies with no readily accessible platform for conscious dialogue and debate with each other under the auspices of leadership, administration and the media. I was longing for emotional connection with my peers in other countries, convinced that the majority of them felt the same.
I met Ayad Alkadhi through a gallery we both showed our work at and learned he was originally from Iraq. His paintings at the time were large textural articulations with Arabic markings revealing an ancient poetic past that the artist still longed for beneath his home country’s explosive contemporary identity. We bonded over our common hunger for expression and I spent a few enjoyable afternoons in his small apartment that doubled as a studio while we discussed our global dynamics over bran muffins and tea.
Over the course of the next decade, I watched with glee as his career exploded and took him back to New York City where he remains today, perpetually evolving his creative process. He continues to create amazingly poignant work in a world where the constant flux of political, economic and social change continues to inspire his profoundly personal yet universal paintings.
Read my interview with Ayad in this month’s Newtopia Magazine.
I was 14 the first time I left a random note in an airplane seat; this time for the elegant forty-year-old blonde who had vacated it for the restroom. I had been eying her the entire ride so far as she was so different than I who had been visiting my father in the humid Midwest and was now returning home to the hot desert for another molasses slow school year that I could not wait to escape from. I wished to be like the blonde – older, free and dressed in the same kind of beige on beige clothes that were made out of linen and hemp and so popular that year. I wrote a simple sentence to her about how classy she was and how much I wished I could be like her someday without any inky clue as to who I, the writer, might be. I didn’t watch as she came back to sit down but I knew she had to have seen it and it gave me a little sense of joy back then to know I had possibly put a smile on someone’s face that day.
This trait of wanting to randomly reach out and touch people has continued throughout my life. It has exponentially increased as my aging has coincided with the technological revolutions of the text message, email missive and Internet social networking machine. It’s so easy to take rich and whimsical communication for granted these days as we flitter on the periphery of dialogue and depth abetted by new tools, which allow us to blurt out one liners at any time in any medium we wish. The pensive musing, poetic note, and hand mailed letter have all but become obsolete – old-fashioned pieces of nostalgia and yellowing lined paper. This coupled with the fact that I am a little perturbed that our memories of each other in person are being supplemented a million pixels a minute by the Facebook photo stream and Instagram hand to hand documentary weapon has inspired me to start a new project.
My daughter bought me a box of postcards a few Christmases back filled with every Vintage book cover ever published by Penguin Books. I discovered them in a dusty box recently and was overjoyed to realize that every one I chose almost automatically reminded me of someone I knew the instant I looked at the title and illustration. So I have embarked upon another project in which I get to surprise others – one in which I draw an image or write a snippet of a poem that represents a memory I have with another person inspired by the particular book cover on the postcard and then I send it to them without signing my name. It doesn’t matter if they never realize who mailed them this card. It doesn’t matter if they even recall the moment I am alluding to with my markings. All that matters is that a piece of them has been jogged from my stony brain’s bank and that my re-introduction of this piece of them to themselves on an otherwise ordinary afternoon will hopefully delight them on their jaunt back inside from the mailbox.
One of the living painters I admire the most is Santa Barbara-based Penelope Gottlieb. She is half conceptual artist and half prolific draftsperson and painter. After spending time with her a decade ago, we completely lost touch and then we synchronistically ran into each other at The Hammer recently. I took the opportunity through our reconnect to interview her for my magazine Newtopia’s one year anniversary issue that launched this week.
Her portraits of extinct species of botanicals are what always enthralled me about her work. She discovered a world of forgotten plants and flowers while reading through old botanical records and painstakingly imagined their every part and petal and reconstituted them onto canvas, breathing lives into them once again and presenting a visual record of something that is no longer. For more on these, please enjoy the article. I find the paintings stunning and the meaning behind them seriously profound and touching.
I am excited to announce my new column for 3 AM Magazine. I spent my early twenties writing a monthly column for 3 AM called Diary of a Californicator and now I am back a little older, a little wiser, but still Naked in Front of Strangers to pen another monthly poetry project. It’s good to be back embroiled in my French punk rock literary roots with Andrew Gallix and the gang.
from a study for “Stardust,” from The Fool, Kimberly Nichols, copyright 2012
Thoughts on the relationship between art and science…
This was a question asked of artist Bill McDowell about his Ashes in the Night Sky works that were beautifully articulated galaxies of stars made entirely of ashes. In a write up on the work in the Morning News, the reporter stated that the medium of ashes created a tangible connection to notions of death and what lies beyond our atmosphere. His answer was that art and science both embrace doubt and uncertainty.
I asked my friends to give me their own interpretations of the relationship between art and science and received the following responses:
You cannot live without either.
Life is richer when both co-exist.
Intelligence, insight, universal understanding.
Love lies between fact and faith.
After love and faith comes poetry.
And one friend recalled her father telling her about creation by explaining, “We are all made of stardust.”
The intersection of art and science has been winding its way into my own work, stemming from that very precious sentiment that we are all connected by cosmic substance and in fact, masters of our own creation. Choosing what to create is elemental to our individual journeys.
When the Fool encounters the Magician on the road, the Magician unfurls the Fool’s sack upon a table and the Fool is amazed to see all the contents of that which he has been carrying: swords and items of conflict, pentacles and tokens of hard work, passion and the pink hot hearts of love, and other mementos of other directions. He is told that he has the power to choose any of these items as a badge of identity, of which to hold proud and to let inform his own road. And he realizes that he has had these items all along, but that now he is ready to stand by his choices, with new found strength and unbridled wisdom.
At this juncture, I choose love.
IMAGE: “Catharsis” by Kimberly Nichols, copyright 2012
In 2011, filmmaker Adam Haynes and I set out to collaborate on a short piece surrounding the concept of intense human experience. I was given eight words and told to expound upon them from my memory bank and to write freely without editing or fear of critique. In the end, I realized that each memory chosen could be connected, by dots to present a peripheral framing of my overall psychological, physical and spiritual narrative. In performing this exercise, and in the pursuant act of sharing it (naked in front of strangers), the psyche could then experience a cohesive sense of catharsis.
Old postal car at the train graveyard, from a study for “The Fool”, Kimberly Nichols
On my road as an artist, I have been traveling for a long time in a place of curiosity. I am not one of those MFA-school bred wonders who had the luxury of being simultaneously schooled and allowed to roam and wander through luscious studio days and hours of critique towards pinpointing an exact medium and voice. It’s been thirty-something years of trial and error, self-teaching and raw, unbridled passion that I would never trade.
I started to draw the girls when I was around ten and by the time I was fourteen my mother stopped trying to banish me from scrawling portraits and figures all over the walls in my bedroom, knowing it was a lost cause. They became little autobiographies of me and ways that I could attempt to understand my place in this world. In my late twenties and early thirties I took this spotlight off of me and started turning my fascinations to psychology and the inner workings of influence, geography, trauma, and environment on a human existence, my art turning into conceptual stabs at the lives of women in general. Today, this has flushed out even more fully, natural in the course of directional evolution, to make me inherently hungry to understand our total human experience, not bound by the limitations of gender and to see how our individual lives can be connected by the shared commonalities in just plain being alive.
I was very lucky as a child to have three built in mentors in my grandparents.
My grandmother Jeanne Doucette Cooper was a traditional landscape and still life painter who worked in oils. By the time she passed away, her garage/studio boasted one beautiful work in progress on a canvas and a household of walls covered every square inch with years worth of light pastel paintings; an intimidating repertoire from the woman who so painstakingly tried to teach me the color wheel and the way of the oils when I would have nothing of it. I was prone to cut things apart and put them together in abstract ways; or to slather quick drying acrylics on top of board as a base for collage. I can only imagine how much patience it took for her to deal with me when we would make houses out of milk cartons at her kitchen table for Christmas nativity scenes and mine would always be slathered with the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy holiday cheer colors of black and grey.
Her husband, my late grandfather Bruce Cooper was my knight in shining armor who worked as a prison guard by day but would spend hours in the garage on weekends creating beautiful works of art out of stained glass jewelry; a hobby he taught himself and in which he became quite talented. I spent a decade of my teens falling asleep to the ballerina spinning around in one of his stained glass jewelry boxes to the tune “The Entertainer” by Scott Joplin from my early favorite movie “The Sting.” He was the one who told me that I saw the world in my very own way and never to forget that or to let someone else tell me how I should see it their way. I never have to this day.
My Grandmother Milly Moen Dykstra, who is still alive and well in Iowa with her bee stung fuchsia lips and black beehive, is the one who I resemble the most out of my entire family and the one who taught me about the twitch. While I was growing up, she had a fully-equipped ceramics studio in the basement of her multi-story Victorian style home and I would spend every visit with her downstairs making molds, glazing figurines, and scraping seams off hot baked owls, ashtrays and mugs. I would get up in the morning and start to twitch because I couldn’t keep my mind on anything else but getting downstairs to choose the day’s project and paint colors. She would say, “That’s the twitch of the artist and it never goes away.”
Today, my art work still never fails to start with a twitch, followed by an emotion of pure bliss that is impossible to shake, just like it did all those years ago at home when I was cutting people out of magazines and prancing them around like paper dolls in the make believe dramas I would create for them. The itch is then followed by sleepless weeks and months of obsessing over the proper way to explore and present my vision. Over the years this has come out in many forms, from painting to photography to performance to mixed media and of late, my leanings have been pondering the primal, innocent and vulnerable connotations of the arts and crafts movement with woodworking and the exploration of pyrography in a nostalgic yet contemporary vein.
For the past two months as I have been in the beginning stages of new work, and concurrently needing to breathe and enjoy the process of discovery that has come along with the challenges in it, I have been experiencing a very interesting phenomena. It started with a dream of a vast universe in oils, lush stroke work covering an entire blackened field where my brush upon canvas started to uncover some interesting tricks; tricks that have never been known to me. It followed a few days later with another dream where I was presented with some large pieces in a gallery that consisted of a strange new version of what could only be derived from the annals of religious stained glass. Last week, the two forms melded onto one blank slate in another dream; a perfect blend of techniques that I could have never thought of in my waking life. And two nights ago it culminated in a step-by-step instructional lesson in my sleeping mind of how I could put all of this together in my waking life. Jumping from bed each time to hurriedly write down each memory, I couldn’t help but feel the presence of something else at work with me. Perhaps, Jeanne and Bruce are in collusion somewhere out there in the great holographic field of consciousness sending me juicy tidbits in forms that only the subconscious level can attain. I welcome it to continue as it’s certainly perpetuated my twitch along with the presence of a singular and wiry strand of kinky, grey-silver hair that now resides on my head as if shot straight out volcano style from the nether regions of my brain.
Kimberly Nichols 