I use the tools of classical painting to provoke emotions in my audience they might more often associate with theater. For example, I think great painting can be funny. My aim is an extremely high-impact experience for the viewer. To go the distance as a painter, you need to step outside received ideas. Writing about Francis Bacon, John Russell said there’s never been a great painting that made people laugh. I disagree. Humor is the most potent tool we have to disarm the viewer and leave them vulnerable to fertile, emotionally complex, and dif cult concepts that are anything but funny.

  Someone once asked me to describe my art in ten words or less. I said: “I paint people: mostly people in their underpants.” It’s a joke, but like most jokes, there is truth in it.

&nbspI think of each work in my Chaos Fields series as part of an imagined plane of infinite possibility, where anything can emerge out of the field/void. This is a play on both the formal field of painting and the frothy, quantum one of physics. At the quantum level, it seems reality’s emergence requires observation; with art, the viewer is also essential.

 I paint the fantasy of me—my story replete with screwups, pleasures, and pleasant fictions. I paint fake portraits and fake views out of a sense of nostalgia for something that I can’t quite remember. Some of these fantasies are illuminated by the refulgence of past encounters, like the glowing filament in a freshly turned-off light bulb. Others are ideas of people whom I haven’t yet met. And some come from who knows, or wherever.

 Sheila Nicolin is a painter who explores the very human struggle to nd intimate connection. Narrated from a naive and voyeuristic perspective, Sheila’s paintings create surrealist glimpses into experiences surrounding loneliness, mental illness, and desire.

 In my work I often use abstraction as a language to communicate a dialogue re ecting the complexities and confluences in contemporary experience.

My practice takes a pluralistic attitude, where certainty is made more unknown by the blur between the natural and digital world. Gesture is a vehicle for both representation and annihilation, a mark of identity substantiated by appropriation.

 My new work deals with my sense of powerlessness against global issues facing the world right now, like climate destruction, war, surveillance, and the current pandemic. I use latex paint with various mixed media like collage, oil, and enamel to create a sense of immediacy and to “imprint” my reaction onto the canvas. I often listen to the news just before painting in order to connect with my feelings about what is happening in the moment.

 There are two narratives running through my paintings: the visual movement of the paint and the figurative depiction. I balance expressionist mark-making and realistic figures to create an emergent image.

 My work reimagines the stages of grief and the delicate interplay between life, death, anger, love, and loss. Despite my best efforts to remain vigilant in my vulnerability, there are multilayered universes within me, oozing at my seams and waiting to be unveiled. My exploration of these themes begins with parts of my own life journey, battling challenge after challenge, while also loving so fully I may burst at any time.