Pe rs o n a l Wo r ks
Denise Nugent 2020
This was the first acrylic painting I had ever made. My previous experience with painting of any sort was as a child taking weekly art classes teaching us technique through the reproduction of Monets and O’keefes.
I am an amatuer. But there was some authenticity to be found, maybe, in deciding to create, for sake of enjoyment, and in spite of knowing that none of it was going to be new. I was just passing through.
This first set is a collection of four separate panels, whose thick page borders could never allow for the sequence to ever be seen together. It was a practice in being present, and allowing each to exist with worth and compositional attention of their own.
It was about following a vague, irrelevent story, panel by panel, until it left sight and something else could take off-center stage.
These next few pieces, circled around, of course, the curiousity of removing the border all together. How to create images that felt cropped and stitched together digitally, through a primitive means of painting. A elongated scene, documented pace by pace, organizes fragmented shots into an image resembling a collage. The frames held tight to the subject, the narratives breath between leisure and tension.
An ongoing series, These last works are scenes of places frequented in childhood, places I regard with my heritage. Taken haphazardly with an iphone, they felt cheap. But these places are not cheap. To offer them the amount of attention and appreciation they deserve, the act of painting them allowed me to revisit these places with intimacy and respect that may have been missed in my adolescence.