Artists to Watch | Nicole Finger

Larger than life

Nicole Finger was a high-school student when she discovered painter Wayne Thiebaud’s iconic portrayals of frosted cakes, meringue pies, and other sweet treats. His paint itself looked like icing, Finger recalls thinking. Back then, though, the budding young artist didn’t feel a yearning to paint food portraits herself. In fact, it would be a few more decades before she would begin depicting similarly scrumptious treats in her own repertoire of oil paintings.

Over the years, Finger has portrayed classic still lifes, landscapes, horses, and the figure. Water, too, became a subject of interest because of its reflective qualities. “And then I went to food,” says the artist, “because there was a reflective quality there, too.” Enter Finger’s oversized portrayals of edible temptations that may soon have you dashing off to a pastry shop, diner, or café to satiate your sudden sweet-tooth craving or grumbling stomach. Glazed donuts, iced cupcakes, carne asada tacos—these and other gastronomic delights fill the artist’s canvases from edge to edge with mouthwatering colors and lifelike detail. “I love doing high realism, but I want to get the hand of the painter to show through, too,” notes Finger.

Indeed, with both their striking realism and painterly qualities, the artist’s compositions pack a visual punch, elevating ordinary subjects through her expressions of color, form, and texture. Working in her studio in Telluride, CO, Finger uses her own reference photographs for guidance as she employs a combination of techniques on her canvases, including scumbling, glazing, and thick and thin layering. Each area of a composition is generally painted wet into wet, one section at a time. “I’m trying to accentuate the actual qualities [of my subject] and mimic them in the paint,” explains Finger, whose trademark approach also includes zooming in on her subjects and making them “larger than life.”

Recently the artist has returned to the figure in a collection called the Concealment Series. These portraits, a number of which feature her own children, depict young men and women wearing items like sunglasses or lace veils, representing a period of young adulthood when “there’s always that level of concealment in hiding themselves,” observes Finger. While such narratives tend to build organically as she’s painting, with every work, she adds, “I still want to convey the emotional, gut reaction I’m going for.” —Kim Agricola

representation
Skidmore Contemporary Art, Santa Monica, CA; Telluride Gallery, Telluride, CO; Victory Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM; www.fingerpaintingart.com.

This story appeared in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.