Nancy Diamond

SOMEONE PAINTS: NANCY DIAMOND’S WILD GIFT

Someone paints a flower and calls it a flower; someone paints a building and calls it a building; someone paints a field. Someone looks at a field and wishes to paint it, or wishes to have painted it, or to have known how. There are flowers in the foreground of the field; they loom. There is a building inside the flower. The building is an architecture, but it also is a dress. The dress is a poppy is a skirt; someone paints it. The paint is called watercolor, oil or gouache; it sinks or it lifts from the ground. The ground is hard board, from which the paint takes off. The sun or something sets beneath the dress; it is dark above. It is almost dark: nothing is as nothing seems. The dress is called a skirt, which is an almost-dress. The sun sets but in a shape that is not a sunset-shape. The almost-sunset looms beneath the almost-skirt, with the almost-dark high above. The whole thing is a UFO but is also a speck. The speck is a cell, looming. It pops, in three or three hundred different ways. It pops in fractals, drapes like

almost-drapery; it is striped but also veined, like a vulva or something. In three ways or in three hundred, the painting flowers, and also it vibrates; the painting takes off. It is no longer on the ground.

To wish is to know the consequences of one’s actions, someone reads in a book, while looking at the looming consequence of someone actions, built from nothing— incredibly!—but paint. A painting is a built wish, a nothing, or it is a something that is not-quite real. Someone is able to launch that wish, to make it for someone somewhere else to catch.

Nancy Diamond’s gorgeous, uncanny, intimate works on view in Petal Tongue bear seemingly off-hand, descriptive titles—“Halo Cloud,” “Grey Orange,” “Flower Dream,” “Poppy Skirt”—that, like the paintings

themselves, are not what they announce. (I announce something / so I can call that / something unreal, writes the poet Lewis Freedman, pushing us over an edge of speech.) The titles give us gentle direction, show us to the painting’s threshold, but don’t tell us that we are entering a wild, off-kilter world, like the garden behind the tiny door Alice finds after falling down a hole. It’s a world of awe-inspiring wonders, where puns abound (orange/orange) and things are very much larger, more complex and magnificent than they normally appear.

Macropsia—a neurological condition experienced by some migraine sufferers, and a symptom of “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome”—causes objects in the visual field to be perceived as very large, to the degree that the perceiver comes to feel correspondingly small. It’s a self-minimizing, world-maximizing condition; it says D on’tlook at me, look up there, something’s happening you’ve got to see. It’s generous that way, as Diamond’s paintings are generous, articulating

their unresolvable essence with a sumptuous, cheeky elegance. Elegant because of the utter grace and skill with which she is able to move between hyper-detail and broad color wash, between micro and macro, the minutely observed and the broadly felt—one might even say between science and spirit. Cheeky because as much as the paintings offer, as with anything worth contemplating, the more you look the less you know.

I don’t know how to paint, but I know what it is to perceive, and the wild, improbable wish that can follow: to transmit what has been seen. Nancy Diamond’s gift is to be— amply— equal to this wish. Her paintings make that elusive, improbable transmission from what she sees to what I want to see when I look at art: an invitation to join the artist in their wild built wish, in their unreal real.

— Anna Moschovakis

16 x 12 inches

POPPY SKIRT, 2023

Acrylic on wood panel

12 x 12 inches

WHITE MOTH, 2022

Acrylic on wood panel

Watercolor and gouache on paper

14 x 11 inches

SPRING MOTH, 2022

INSECTS AND MOON, 2021

12 x 12 inches

Acrylic and oil on wood panel

10 x 10 inches

YELLOW BUD, 2022

Acrylic and oil on wood panel

ANEMONES, 2023

Watercolor and gouache on paper

16 x 20 inches

9 x 12 inches

WILD PANSY II, 2022

Watercolor and gouache on paper

11 x 14 inches

CORE, 2022

Watercolor and gouache on paper

Watercolor and gouache on paper

11 x 14 inches

DARK MIDDLE, 2023

Watercolor and gouache on paper

14 x 11 inches

DUSK POPPY, 2021

18 x 18 inches

POPPY BOTTOM, 2023

Acrylic and oil on wood panel

13 x 13 inches

SUN DOTS, 2024

Gouache and acrylic on wood

13 x 13 inches

FLOATING FLOWER, 2023

Acrylic on wood panel

13 x 12 inches

RED TULIP, 2022

Acrylic and oil on wood panel

12 x 16 inches

FLOWER DREAM, 2023

Acrylic on linen

SUN AND FLOWERHEADS, 2022

Watercolor and gouache on paper

10 3/4 x 11 inches

NIGHT PODS, 2023

Acrylic on linen

14 x 11 inche

HALO CLOUDS, 2020

Watercolor and gouache on paper

16 x 12 inches

TREES AT NIGHT, 2020

Watercolor and gouache on paper

20 x 16 inches

THUNDER ROLL, 2023

Watercolor and gouache on paper

12 x 16 inches

Watercolor and gouache on paper

12 x 16 inches

MOUNTAIN WAVE, 2022

12 x 16 inches

GREY ORANGE, 2022

Watercolor and gouache on paper

Watercolor and gouache on paper

12 x 16 inches

BLUE GLYPHS, 2022

11 x 14 inches

PINK CLOUD SUNSET, 2023

Watercolor and gouache on paper

NANCY DIAMOND

American artist, born in 1962

Lives and works in upstate New York

EDUCATION

1985 BFA Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

AWARDS

1996 - 1997 National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Arts Fellowship

1995 - 1996 Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, The Space Program Residency

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2024 Petal Tongue, Maya Frodeman Gallery (formerly Tayloe Piggott Gallery), Jackson, WY, solo exhibition

2023 Spring Show, abstract and nature based work, Art Sales and Research, Clinton Corners, NY, group exhibition

Inside Voice, Saira McClaren and Nancy Diamond, Bushel Collective, Delhi, NY, two-person exhibition

Force of Nature, MAMA Gallery, Chicago, IL, group exhibition

2022 Nancy Diamond: In The Ether, Tayloe Pigott Gallery, Jackson, WY, solo exhibition

I exist as I am, Paintings by Nancy Diamond and Hans Hofmann, Tayloe Pigott Gallery, Jackson, WY, twoperson exhibition

2021 Further In Summer Than the Birds, Platform Project Space, curated by Jennifer Coates, Brooklyn, NY, four-person exhibition

Many Portals, curated by Melissa Thorne and Kelli Cain, Half Hidden, Delhi, NY, group exhibition

2020 Society for Contemporary Art Collectors Sale, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, group exhibition

2018 - 2019 Earth Eye: Works on Paper, Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, solo exhibition

2016 Project Room, Kabinett & Kammer, Andes, NY, solo exhibition

The Persistent Nature of Urgency: Works on Paper, group exhibition curated by Jeff Quinn and Lowell Boyers, New York, NY

2014 Enticing Luminosity, group exhibition curated by Olive Ayhens, Lesley

Heller, Workspace, New York, NY

2013 Unhinged, Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, group exhibition

2011 Williamsburg 2000, group exhibition curated by Larry Walczak, Art101, Brooklyn, NY

2003 Drawing into Painting: Nancy Diamond, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Al Taylor, Galerie Charles Schumann Gallery, Munich, Germany, threeperson exhibition

2002 Artists to Artists, ACE Gallery, Space Program Artists, New York, NY, group exhibition

2001 Humanoid, group show, Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York, NY

Figstract Explosionism, group show curated by Tom Burckhardt, Bridgewater, Lustberg, Blumenfeld, New York, NY

Humanoid, DiverseWorks, Houston,TX, group exhibition

2000 Collector’s Choice, Selected by Richard Ekstract, Exit Art/The First World, New York, NY, group exhibition

Selections, Eyewash, Brooklyn, NY, group exhibition

Abstract Paintings on Paper, Grimm Gallery, New York, NY, group exhibition

1999 Natural Origins, group show, Pace University Gallery, Pleasantville, New York, NY, group exhibition

Packing a Punch, Eyewash, Brooklyn, NY, group exhibition

Humanoid, The Vedanta Gallery, Chicago, IL, group exhibition

1998 Humanoid, group show, Genovese/

1997

Sullivan Gallery, Boston, MA, group exhibition

The Press of My Foot Springs a Hundred Affections, curated by Byron Kim, The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, group exhibition

The Art Exchange Show, New York, NY

Suture, group exhibition curated by Annie Herron, The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

1996 Nancy Diamond, Project Room, Black & Herron Space, New York, NY, solo exhibition

The Art Exchange Show, NYC

Birds and Bees, Esso Gallery, New York, NY, group exhibition

Pet Paintings, Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA, group exhibition

1994 Biennial Exhibition, Parrish Museum, Southampton, NY, group exhibition

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

2001 “Figstract Explosionism,” The New Yorker, February 19-26 2000 Karen Wilkin, “At the Galleries,” Partisan Review, March

1998 N.F. Karlins, “Drawing Notebook,” artnet.com, February/March 1998

1997 Matt Murphy, “The Humanoid,” Arts Media, Boston, March 1997

“Suture,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 12

“The Press of My Foot to the Earth Springs a Hundred Affections”

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September

“Exhibit of Landscapes By Six Local Painters,” Newsday, October 12

1996 Frances Chapman, “Suture”

Waterfront Week, Volume 7.2

NEA, MAAF Fellows, Artslink, Volume 7, no. 3 “Short List,” The New Yorker, March 25

“Short List,” The New Yorker, April 1

1994 Phyllis Braff, “Parrish Biennial,” New York Times, April 24

BOOKS AND CATALOGUES

2008 Fritz Drury, Joanne Stryker, Drawing: Structure and Vision, Prentice Hall

2002 Artists to Artists; A Decade of The Space Program, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Colorado Springs, CO