Nicola Wheston

 I found this artist quite interesting and certainly has a range.  She has a unique artist statement on her website. John was at a show she had on Saltspring

Artist Statement

Detail of “Boundaries, What Boundaries”

I am a figurative and landscape artist living on Salt Spring Island. I come from a traditional background and training in painting —painting the figure from life and capturing the landscape plein air. Painting what I observe has challenged me for all of my adult life. It is a never-ending process of perception, intentions, trials and solutions.

I feel fortunate to have two distinct bodies of work. Through my figurative painting, I explore relationships, boundaries and interpersonal connections. My landscape painting allows me to emphasize the dynamic interplay of natural systems and express the drama of trees, plants and skies.

The figurative paintings focus on the psychological aspects of our humanity, including all the foibles and eccentricities of our daily lives, as well as the relationships we have with each other, ourselves, our pets and our surroundings. The experiences of my own life have always been an influence on my work. I frequently use my body as model to explore private moments, absurd situations and aging. In my portraits of others, I tend to portray solitary poses that are often intimate and personal, even secretive. My recent paintings have focused on household products, the junk we collect and the horror of it all. I recently cleared out a relative’s estate and my experiences underscored the pathology of consumption and the degree to which it can trap us.

I learned to paint landscapes many years after starting to work with the figure. I brought to landscape my sense of painting as research into form, structure and light, and the challenges of translating the three-dimensional world onto two-dimensional canvasses. Painting outdoors also brings weather, wind, insects and animals, and the trials of keeping the work clean. I am drawn to trees more than open expanses because trees are like figures to me. Painting the landscape is as psychologically intense as the figurative work.

Some of her landscape paintings:

John Denniston photos.



August 7th, 2018 — Guests at the opening of Nicola Wheston’s show at Artspring Gallery on Saltspring Island take a very close look at one of the large panel paintings from her series, “The Beginning and the End of Stuff”. Below is Nicola earlier in the day preparing for the opening.