Nora Wiley-Schwartz

My practice is based in painting and drawing, working with themes of nostalgia and domesticity in day to day life. I am consistently exploring the everyday environment around me and appreciating the mundane in my paintings. Brooklyn brownstones have been a large source of inspiration for me, starting in my time away from New York and growing as I returned. I have also begun focusing on landscapes and figurative work from other parts of my childhood and adult life at camps and residencies that take place in the woods. Tying into my own nostalgia I was able to reminisce on my childhood in Brooklyn, and the quiet scenes of the artistic spaces we retreat to outside of the city.

From going back and forth between Brooklyn and Chicago, I am constantly reflecting on who I am in each environment and how it shapes me as a person and an artist. The sweetness of domesticity and the loneliness of new found independence leak through the paper. My Brooklyn oil paintings are twenty years of walking over the same cracks in the street. They are a love letter to the safety of the familiar, and an attempt to connect myself back home. I have also begun focusing on landscapes from other parts of my childhood and adult life at camps and residencies that take place in the woods. Tying into my own nostalgia I was able to reminisce on my childhood in Brooklyn, and the quiet scenes of the artistic spaces we retreat to outside of the city. Each piece of mine is a study: a study of how physical paint looks, feels, and acts in relationship to the ground and to itself; a study of my memories, emotions, and childhood; a study of nostalgia. Painting is a way for me to incorporate my interest in the intimacy of day to day life into my love of paint and color. I take inspiration from people, places, and things that I encounter in my everyday life through their narrative and emotion. I want my audience to feel like they've been transported either emotionally or physically into the scenery of my images.