Artist's Statement
To see a catalog of some of my previous work, click here.
I have been called “an intimist,” a word coined by a mentor who understood my obsession as an artist with detail and the intimate, small moment containing the vast.
As an interdisciplinary visual artist, published poet and author, my work is conceptually driven, using the mediums that best serve the concept. A common theme in my work is interiors: physical interiors such as rooms, interior states of being communicated through figurative works, interiors like heartlands and depths. In my life, the old ways, inseparable from a prescribed life of domesticity, were passed down generation to generation from ancestors who survived hardship and loss, especially during the Holocaust, with persistence and imagination. This huge legacy of women dedicated to a domestic life never fit me as an artist though I owe it a debt of gratitude. My essential question as an artist and as a woman is “How can I stay connected to the past without being held back by it when the world asks for so much more from me?
My interest in transparency, layering and translucency led me to create artworks painted in a Flemish old master technique of an under-painting in grays finished with transparent glazes of color painted in layers like sheets of colored glass. Sometimes I skip the “dead layer,” the under-painting in grays. Instead, I begin with the glazes right on the surface. The light passes through the layers creating the color; for instance, where there is green, it’s created by a pure yellow and a pure blue glazed in separate layers, each one taking 24 hours to dry. My paintings can have ten to twenty layers of glazes. The end result is a shiny, translucent enamel-like surface suffused with a kind of glow.
Poetry, figure drawing and painting are often at the core of my practice. I love the body and all it contains; its memory, form, desire and emotion. I’m often addressing questions in my work about how the human body experiences the world, both the beauty and the burden of that experience. I also have a passionate engagement with paint, its body. Just like the human body, it can be thick and thin, fluid, pliant or resistant by turns, and dries with the passage of time. The gestures of the human body including, for instance, the turn of a head, shifting planes of the back or a bend of neck, translate into gestures of paint – swipes of the brush, large passages of quiet, meditative glazes and details. My interest in the relationship between text and imagery is another constant inspiration.
I take my own black and white photographs with a Nikon FE film camera gifted to me by my late father, and develop my film in the darkroom. The long hours spent with slow processes such as this in meditation and observation of a subject to translate it into a painting, poem, or sculptural work is an element of the finished work that is extremely important to me. Contemporary life is rushed, and we don’t often have the opportunity to slow down to be fully present or find stillness and reflection in the face of a world in crisis dominated by speed, drama and spectacle.
I first experienced an appreciation of the handmade from makers in my family, particularly the women who knitted, tatted, crocheted, embroidered, baked and cooked, taking their time to make fine handmade objects that all bore the print of the maker and the obvious signs of hours and hours of careful, patient craft. Even the recipes, handed down to me, an avid baker, were handwritten, with the fingerprints and notations of the pastry maker preserved as a valued part of the inheritance. I grew up on stories of strong ancestors who survived hardships with imagination and persistence, tools that as an artist I count among my most essential.
Nan Ring 2023