Hartford
Painter Finds Light In Darkness
by | Oct 27, 2024 2:12 pm
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Posted to: Visual Art
Flow No. 2 by Jill Harrington Nichols
Divine Cosmos
Clare Gallery
St. Patrick – St. Anthony Church
Hartford
Oct. 24, 2024
The Clare Gallery at St. Patrick – St. Anthony Church in downtown Hartford has become one of my favorite places to view visual artwork, so a new exhibit is always a treat.
The gallery opened Divine Cosmos by artist Jill Harrington Nichols, a Connecticut-based artist who has won awards from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, and Connecticut Office of the Arts. When you take a look at her artwork, it’s easy to see why.
Nichols uses reclaimed metals — aluminum, steel or copper — as the surface she paints on. It gives her work a darker tint that still celebrates the “heart, soul, and beauty that connects us all” that Nichols tries to convey in her work.
Autumn
Take the painting simply titled “Autumn.” Pictures of the sky, particularly those featuring clouds and birds, are usually bright and sunny, but Nichol’s swirling clouds portend a coldness that the geese in the image are eager to escape from. Still, there isn’t much melancholy or foreboding in the painting, just a natural transition to the next part of the planet’s cycle. Nichols describes her work as “…poetry, a lyrical composition of color and light.” Something I’ve come to appreciate about light in the creative process is that darkness is not the antithesis of light, but instead another shade to paint with.
Clouds in Blue Minor
Take “Clouds in Blue Minor,” an oil on aluminum painting which also captures the interplay of the wide open sky and the clouds which call it home. The clouds have claimed almost the entirety of the heavens in this image, leaving only a crescent-shaped swath in the center where the blue sky is visible. The swirling edges of the clouds are dark, but not gloomy, revealing depth amongst the clouds through the casting of shadow and the mystery of darkness.
Yet the center of the painting shows the glow of the sun, reflecting off the hazy clouds like a beacon. The existence of light and shadow within mere feet of each other reflects our own world in literal and metaphorical ways.
Flow No. 4
Nichols’ ability to make the absence of light inviting, even celebratory, challenges many of the ideas I had about symbolism and representation in visual arts. “Flow No. 4” is a particularly challenging piece when recontextualizing the darkness and the light. My initial response to it is to see it as representative of an oil spill or some other natural disaster that Nichols painstakingly represents in her other works.
But that’s not really the case here. The darkness in the center of the piece is not the absence of the yellow or white streaks of paint, but a compliment that both helps them stand out but also presents a striking image of its own. In this painting I see the different forces of nature, swirling and clashing together. On the right, outlined in white paint, a primordial beast screams, while to the left a yellow claw slashes mindlessly at the canvas. Nature is a constant clash of energy, between the jet stream and the trade winds, hunters and prey, and humans trying to find our place in all of it.
I enjoyed Nichol’s expressiveness with light and dark, and how she used both to showcase the world. It takes both elements to truly capture the entire essence of nature and beauty.
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Divine Cosmos runs at the Clare Gallery through Dec. 8.
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