Selected Works: Oil Paintings

Artist Statement

I am always working to capture the flux, a rift, the shift between an interior mental space and exterior physicality. Through these paintings I am exploring routes to expose this intermediary space and my own meanderings through it, making it material and tactile to the viewer. I aim to create work that captures a sensation more than rendering a likeness, using the human body and its artifacts as sites of common sensual and affective happenings to engage my viewer in this shared experience.

Central to the creation of these works are my own experiences with and perception of anxiety and feelings of cerebral discord—both the causation and effect, potential triggers and eventual outcomes. I choose images that speak to my psychological quirks and happenings, that pictorialize a state of dissettlement or unease. Through the aggregation of acutely rendered imagery with passages of more impulsive and visceral paint handling, I seek to make visible the spectrum of sensations at play, from a manic and frenzied energy, to quiet and stillness, ultimately collapsing the spaces between.

Though elements of self-examination and introspection lie at the core of my work, it is not my intent for the imagery to be viewed as solely personal or directly as self-portraiture. Rather, I want viewers to be active in their perceptual response, to engage with the work and draw connections between it and their own experiences and decipherment. These paintings are my attempt to outline this sometimes tenuous and turbulent connection between one’s interior and exterior environments, acknowledging both the unique experience of the individual and the universality of the sensation.

Nicole TrimbleNicole Trimble is an Ohio-based artist and educator with a studio practice grounded in painting and observation of the human figure. She holds a BFA in painting and printmaking from Miami University, and an MFA from the University of Cincinnati’s College of DAAP. She currently lives and works in Cincinnati, OH. www.nicole-trimble.com