Natalie Niblack

Natalie Niblack has lived and worked in the Northwest for 26 years, and currently resides north of Seattle in Skagit Valley. She works in a wide variety of media including printmaking, ceramic, and especially her first loves, drawing and painting. Her career as an artist began in the early 80's when she studied at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle with Nancy Johnson and Gene McMahon. In 1993, she received a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the Edinburgh College of Art in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is currently teaching drawing and painting at Skagit Valley Community College and Shoreline Community College, where she is also the gallery curator. Her work is represented in Seattle by Gallery 110 in Pioneer Square, Art on Center Gallery in Tacoma and Gallery by the Bay in Stanwood. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group venues as diverse as Chicago, The Orkney Islands in Scotland, and Poland. From 1996- 1998, Niblack was the president of the Seattle Women's Caucus for Art, a chapter of the National WCA. Her work is in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, The University of Washington Hospital, The City Arts Center in Edinburgh, and the Glasgow Museums and Galleries Collection.

Statement
     My work has always concerned the figure in one form or another, and it appears here in many manifestations.  Sometimes I use surrogates such as dolls and saints, and sometimes my sources are snapshots of people   I make these images because they hint at content without meaning anything explicit: Dolls and Saints  quietly witness while making gestures with obscure meanings or family groups smile gamely at nothing without self consciousness or insight. Their appeal and mystery lie in the fact that they could mean anything or nothing, and will mean something different to each person that sees them. Ultimately I do this because these disparate elements coming  together and the fact that they have the potential to have individual meanings pleases me deeply.   
I collect family photographs – my own and those of strangers-  because they are narrative, only the context is lost and the viewer  doesn’t know the story.   The atmosphere of connection, alienation and all the subtleties in between are what drives the image and can be a mirror of the viewer’s preconceptions, assumptions, and prejudices.  You must bring yourself to the image to read it.  In addition, painting from photographs allows me to take liberties with the paint surface- I do not feel locked in to reality as when working from observation..  A nuance of application, a greasy blurring or smudge of paint can alter the emotional dynamic of the imagery and that is what interests me.   It is only paint, after all.
     Saints I like because I love Italian painting.  Anything that presents a paradox appeals to me; in this instance, the other- worldly beauty depicting such extremes of brutality (think of Saint Sebastian or Saint Agatha).  From a 21st century, secular point of view, the imagery can take on an absurd surrealist  aspect, such as Fra Angelico’s admonishing, disembodied hands, or the axe through St. Peter Martyr’s head.  I also like to reference Saints because the work of Bellini, Giotto, Perugino, and Fra Angelico (among others), has a crystalline clarity, a sureness about it that is difficult to find in contemporary work.  Living in a spiritually ambivalent post existential, post modern era, it is like comfort food.  However, my Saints tend to be amoral, or rather, morality is not at issue.  They are obscure, they contradict.  They have no answers.
     Dolls are a strange combination of beliefs and superstitions, drawn from dream images, nostalgic memory, and the certainty of an adult in an absurd universe.  I am fascinated with the aging, discarded dolls no else wants.  The faded, uncomprehending smiles and battered and beaten bodies of these old dolls seem to belie the Buddha-like serenity of their expressions, and the peeling paint doesn’t change the chubby  new-baby shape of their bodies.  They age, yet youth remains; sullied, tarnished, and unbending.   And so my fascination with them: are they stupid or  profound, old or young, noble or perverse? They can act out the absurdity of human behavior and remain unscathed.  No amount of abuse can wipe their painted smiles clean.  Impervious to it, they speak of either spiritual depth or denial- like Buddha, like Barbie.