Art Sync: Seemingly Nothing At All

Elizabeth Johnson: Our last interview for Gross McCleaf Gallery was titled Basically Just Grass Forever, stemming from your comment on a painting that featured a small house on a giant lawn that appeared to render each blade of grass. Your recent work seems to show details less intensely, allowing space to feel boundless, more of an idea. The Clock series seem to tell time by looking at the sky. Without your title, I think I am looking at abstract painting: with the title, I sense the depth of sky at different times of day.

Nicole Parker: The clocks do look abstract, but they are the most directly observational things I’ve done in a while! And each one is the sky at different times of day and facing different directions. I’ve been making them while looking out my studio window, or from inside my car in parking lots. There’s a lot at stake, because if the color relationships are off, it breaks the illusion. I love getting it just right. When the subject is something as elemental as light/air/atmosphere, color isn’t just the most important thing but is the only thing left.

NP: I became an intaglio printmaker, so, I’m definitely influenced by printmaking. I think and work in layers and steps, and printmaking is process-heavy and well suited for my brain type. I’ve never been a gestural or expressive painter (what I call a “painter’s painter” or “master of the goop”), but I’ve learned to embrace that and to recognize that there’s no one correct way to use any medium. The way I approach the two mediums gets closer and closer over time.

The clocks are an experiment about space, the idea of “empty” air and how little information a painting can include while still evoking something familiar and nostalgic. It’s interesting how we perceive things like “light” and “sky” and “air” as synonymous with “empty,” when we rely on these things for essential context. We say things, like, “it’s getting dark out, better head in” or “looks like it might rain,” which are observations based on the changing appearance of––this is the funny part––seemingly nothing at all.

NP: Nothing sets me off emotionally like fleeting color and light, and this year I wanted to focus on that. It’s like my memento mori. Everything is temporary, everything will pass. To me, that’s both amazing and tragic. I want to cling to things though I know I can’t hold them forever, but I also realize that the knowledge of temporariness is part of what lets me love those things so fully. That feeling is so elemental, and it’s hidden underneath everything I do.

Tiger and The Blizzard are about the experience of seeing without knowing, which is a very childlike thing. I have a few paintings in the show with distant lamp posts. As a kid, lights in the dark seemed alive and alien. Light from lamp posts seemed friendly and comforting. Meanwhile, I was terrified of the light on my walls from passing cars, because they moved and roared––the cars were loud.

The desk in Tiger lives in my bedroom. It was the first thing I’d see when I woke up each morning with the light raking in, and I’d giggle and think, “Four legs, stripes––looks like a tiger.”

EJ: Do memories change by painting them?

NP: My memories haven’t really changed, but my perception and outlook have. Making art about places and memories has always let me document and process. Since my last show with GMG, “home” has changed both literally and figuratively. I moved just before the last show went up, and the work from that show was about the place I lived previously (and who I was when I was there). Though we had a good life in our last house, that place often felt frustrating and stifling. I lived in that house soon after undergrad and throughout the COVID lockdown, while I was trying to navigate my new career, city, and adult life. I felt displaced, isolated, and like I was drifting aimlessly. In hindsight, I know it was about the period of life I was in, more than the house itself, but in my memory the feeling is attached to the place.

My new house is wonderful and feels like home in a way the old one didn’t, but I’ve grown a little too. I’m feeling more settled and secure in my life and career. Every year, I focus on the core ideas that are at the root of my identity, and “Home” is one of those core ideas. But what it means now might not be what it means five, ten years down the line.

NP: I decided to try the same in my paintings and prints, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the challenge. I love the dark and the nighttime, and I’m finding a lot of richness and personality in it. I have nothing against using a black pigment, and it’s possible I’ll return to it one day, but for now I’m enjoying life without it.

EJ: Green and Gold works kind of like Breakfast, simultaneously eliciting cozy interior space and peripheral drama. Our gaze is directed toward effects rather than a central subject. In our last interview we talked about dissociation and how you preferred the word liminal to indicate in-betweenness. Of your new pieces that have subjects, would you say that you are depicting fewer wide-open fields and spaces, but are suggesting boundlessness in a more mental or narrative way?

EJ: You go on to say, "This method scratches an academic itch I have without making me feel like I'm restricted." Does “academic” here mean logical or established in art history? Do you mean you are building your own art canon of imagery and symbols? For example, Don't Worry Kid, It's Not Real may be the most disturbing painting in the show. I sense you are questioning perception and talking about environment and electricity. My curiosity is really piqued. I almost want not to know the story to continue enjoying being confounded. But tell me anyway: what is this painting about? Is the narrator a fiction too?

NP: “Academic” here means that it’s logical and knowledge-building. It’s researched without feeling slavish or like I’m tied to a specific reference source. I really value methods and some ideologies that are rooted in art history too. My education and artistic roots are that type of academic. I still love and relish it, my work is very much historically driven, but I want to add some of my own seasoning to an old recipe.  But yes, I love my iconography.  Deer pop up in my work a lot. Every time I think I’m done––oops, there’s another one.

Nicole Parker is an oil painter and intaglio printmaker based in Mount Airy, Maryland. She received her BFA and Certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in 2018, and has held a steady studio practice since graduating. She was a recipient of the Richard Von Hess Travel Scholarship in 2017, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2022. Nicole looks forward to her fifth solo exhibition, How Sad, How Lovely, displayed at Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, where she is currently represented. Her work is held in collections throughout the U.S., including at PAFA, the Woodmere Art Museum, and the private collection of Linda Lee Alter. Nicole can usually be found working in her home studio (a converted attic), or etching and printing plates at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, MD, where she greatly enjoys both teaching and learning from other artists.