Eva Nicolait

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 am largely self-taught. I began as a teenager, having discovered the excitement of drawing in a life drawing class. I studied painting at the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara for a year, but it was the 60s, and there was not the discipline I sought. So, I continued to study life drawing through adult education. After moving to San Francisco in 1978, I took a long break from painting and began writing fiction, producing six novels and a collection of short stories. I returned to painting full-time in 2001. A native Californian, I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2015.

2-D, Painting (all materials)