CURRENT
EXHIBITION
Carrie Nixon
Follow Your Bliss (Artists, Art Students, and Artisans at Work)
October
19 – November 20
Opening Reception &
Remarks
Tuesday, October 20, 4:30
p.m.
Carrie
Nixon
Follow
Your Bliss (Artists, Art Students, and
Artisans at Work)
An integral part of Carrie’s education was living abroad: two summers in Colmar, Alsace, France, home of the celebrated Eisenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald; a semester abroad in Rome, Italy; and a year after college in Lima, Peru.
Carrie has exhibited extensively in the Midwest and Northeast, including at Allan Stone Gallery in New York, The Peace Museum in Chicago, and at a number of universities and colleges in New Jersey, Ohio, and Michigan. She has had some unusual art-related jobs besides teaching, such as working as a Courtroom Artist for Channel 7 in Detroit, doing scientific drawings of the dissection of an elephant, and assisting muralist Robert Dafford on large outdoor historical murals in Covington, KY and Vicksburg, MS.
Carrie’s current series of paintings and drawings explore artists and artisans at work, including muralists, painters, carpenters, and above all, her Assumption College students absorbed in their creative pursuits. As a lifelong art professor, she has chosen to focus on the arena she knows best: that of individuals, especially students, caught up in making art.
Artist’s Statement:
“Write
about what interests you—and interests
you deeply—and your readers will catch
fire at your words." ---Valerie Sherwood (Paraphrase
“Paint and
draw…”)
“This
is the real secret of life - to be
completely 'engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.”' Alan
Watts, Work as Play
I have always explored
figuration in my
work. The challenge of drawing/painting
the human figure in varied settings attracts me; at the same time, the
figure
serves as a vehicle to raise psychological, social, and spiritual
questions.
In this series of drawings
and paintings,
my focus is on artists, art students, and artisans absorbed in their
work. I am intrigued by their poses, by
the
relationship of the bodies to the spaces around them, and the mystery surrounding their creations. My
role is part voyeuristic and part
co-creator. As variations on a theme,
some works are more “representational,” a.k.a., realistic, while others
explore
imagined color or implied settings (such as the cut-outs of the
muralists).
My ongoing interest in
recording human
activity may well spring from a wish to stop and seize the relentless
flow of
time, in short, a futile protest against mortality. Art-making is also a resistance to or even
triumph over mortality. These paintings
and drawings are not overtly political, but in highlighting humans who
use
their hands to make unique works, they do counter the relentless
technological
dehumanization that is engulfing our planet.
Technically, the drawings
are pastel on
paper, and the paintings are either oil paint or paint stick (oil paint
in
stick form, a bridge between the rich color of oil paint and the
directness of
drawing). My inspirations include
representational
artists such as Velasquez, Lucien Freud, Bill Viola and William
Kentridge, as
well as non-figurative artists such as Julie Mehretu, Anselm Kiefer,
and Joan
Mitchell.