Nicole's Story Behind The Painting:

I’d been thinking a lot about transformation and how that requires unclenching our fists, giving into uncertainty, letting go of some rigidity.

When I started this painting several months before I completed it, it was all one color, one particular shade of blue. The only real variation in the painting was the brushstrokes. And when I had initially begun this work, it was after singing to a chair in the corner of my apartment. In the chair, I pictured a person I knew. Later when I was painting, I mixed the colors right on the canvas. The following day, after starting this piece, I looked at the blue painting and it was nearly the exact same color as the chair where I pictured the person I was singing to.

I think I didn’t change the monochrome painting for a really long time (even though I sensed there was more I needed to do with it) because holding out hope in a superstitious, subconscious way that if the chair could only hold the imaginary person, maybe the painting was somehow more real, that somehow changing the painting could change my fate.

But one day several weeks later, I just drew on the blue painting and then put it back on the shelf. (Baby step toward a bigger change!) And then toward the beginning of 2021, I transformed the original painting into this work, because deep down I know well that rigidity cannot change reality. And after acceptance, transformation can help us make a new reality that's real and feels more free.