"Marigny House" by Nikki Nolan
“I’ll be walking around my neighborhood. I’ll be walking and not thinking I’m planning a painting, but then I’ll see something that looks nice and I’ll try to get a good composition.”
For New Orleans artist Nikki Nolan, ‘nice’ equals something very particular. She’s drawn to that gritty-but-pretty quality familiar to New Orleanians attuned to their city’s propensity for delivering vignettes of weird, unintentional beauty. Once Nolan spots a scene that begs to be painted, she’ll take a sneaky photo and retire to her studio, and might spend three to six months getting things just so. “I don’t paint in a traditional, gestural way; I get really fixated on the details,” she admitted. But for Nolan and her viewers, the details are where the magic lies. There’s a surreptitious, voyeuristic, playful quality that draws a viewer’s eye to the inadvertent elements that anchor any scene—from a meticulously styled front porch, to still lifes, to wheelie bins overflowing with summer greenery—in the here-and-now. “The unifying thing,” she says, “is finding the silly little detail that makes a place feel familiar, charming, and humorous. If something’s too perfect I don’t want to paint it.”
