Our Stories of Each Other
oil on panel
64" x 38"
2005

Art New England, August/September 2005

“Private Stories” by Nicole McCormick
at Three Graces Gallery, Portsmouth

Narrative is trendy in art today, though good narrative is rarer than ever. As always, the trick is to make time “thicken”, so that it becomes essential to the form and texture of the art. Nicole McCormick has achieved genuine “thick time” in her new paintings at Three Graces Gallery in Portsmouth. Entering the gallery, I quickly fixed on Our Stories of Each Other, a large, hauntingly successful mix of space and time, reality and imagination. Eyes closed, clad in white, McCormick stands amongst imagined children, past and future boyfriends, and a weird troll, dreaming, as it were, a story of her life. Much of the dream’s “thickness” comes from her uncommonly rich colors and paint textures, as well as plays of shadow against light that enhance mystery. Subtle mutations of figure scale also make time curiously malleable by speaking more to demands of plot and feeling than to rules of conventional perspective. Not all of McCormick’s paintings are so autobiographical, but they’re all personal on some level, and they share some of the same spatial and psychological gymnastics. Windows and doorways regularly mediate between states of mind and layers of reality. It needs to be said too the Nicole McCormick is a funny artist. She knows how to turn irony, contradiction, or the odd detail into laughter, which can be subtle or rowdy, but always enriching. Until now she’s mainly been known for her small self portraits, often in funny hats, which run the gamut from deep to goofy, leaving no room for any fixed identity. Moving into larger formats and narrative subjects in “Private Stories” unquestionably marks a major step up in her career. Bur her success comes from an intuitive openness to chance and mutability that seems to have been there from the beginning.

David Smith