About — Eva Nicolait

About the artist

I practice in figuration and abstraction.The tensions of space, balance, and color are elements that I pursue in both forms, particularly as these relationships provide areas of confinement, safety, conflict, and provocation in both abstraction and figuration. I use these relationships to explore the language of painting and emotions. But most of all, getting there is what’s interesting to me: problem solving; messing up a perfectly good start because it’s not interesting; having to deal with a whole new set of cards after I play just one; doing something that doesn’t work and resolving that different dilemma. I like to see the exciting traces of all these decisions in my own paintings as well as others’.

With figuration, I begin with a drawing. The line for me is a powerful component in a figurative project because the skill and intuition of the hands can reveal what the mind and heart are up to, often before we know ourselves. My figures, whether animal or human, hold onto their space on the canvas, at times tenuously, in a way that describes something innate about their lives.

The Woman Series explores the observation of women, the scrutiny from others, the resulting self-consciousness we carry through much of our lives, and how that relates to the way we occupy space.

The Women Series reflects women relating to each other, in friendship, family, romance, and the unique challenges that women encounter facing the world. Our image of ourselves shift with perception, with our view of other women, and as experienced through our own filters of expectations.

The Men series is a recently-begun section without much explanation at this point.

Faces In A Crowd paintings are, like everything, compositional challenges, but mainly just goofy stuff, an introvert’s view of, and encounters with, the world.

The Dog series is an engagement with figuration, pure and simple.

The Horse series, I Am Not Your Dream, engages my practice in figuration and also my deep appreciation for what I have learned and have yet to learn about horses. Horses have been used as subjects in art for ages, and they have been entrenched in our imaginations for as long. They’ve been employed as utilitarian tools as well as soul mates. They are neither. They are their own selves, in their own world of survival and social order. My goal in these paintings is to portray them in their lives as they live them, in moments of repose, alertness, social bonding, and distress. They are magnificent animals, both strong and fragile, physically and emotionally, and I seek to offer them with the understanding they deserve.

With abstractions, Drawing is still at the forefront of what I do here as I work toward emotional and provocative relationships of forms. My goal is to resolve the formal problems of weight and balance in a way that retains the possibility and tension of further realignment, as do our human relationships.

The Excavations Series embarks on a process of gradual build-up, then obliteration, and, in the final stages, exposure of a composition as I wipe away paint to find provocative relationships.

The Root Systems Series, where origins begin, taper off, and, either continue or fade away, is a series that reflects many aspects of life to me: roots that bind us psychologically, lead us astray, meander with us through the layers of our lives; and roots that embrace us philosophically, our metaphoric connective tissue.

The Life Drawing Series is visually close to Roots but diverges in intent, and exists without the same philosophical underpinnings. Life Drawing is what happens for me when combining experience with abandon.