Magic Memory Place

Click on this link to read a Newsday feature of Nicholas Emery's exhibition Magic Memory Place

house of dreams, acrylic, oil pastel, & pencil on canvas, 26” x 36”, 2022

My latest exhibition entitled Magic Memory Place is my most personal exhibition to date. It is the culmination of an enigmatic journey I began years ago to contextualize and reflect my love and connection to Trinidad. Many of the experiences I have felt, considered, and nursed into being through my paintings I have had in Trinidad, or in meditation on Trinidad from afar. Like the paintings, Magic Memory Place are words that stand apart from each other and are likewise inseparable. They contain elements of secrets, loss, and healing.

For me, Trinidad is saudade, the mixed state of melancholic and joyful yearning that cannot be expressed with words. Upon reflection then, what is woven into the paintings are the tendrils of my varying states of meditation and consciousness with Trinidad, and my love for her and her people, of which I am one.

Click on this link to see the full body of work from the exhibition https://www.nicholasemeryart.com/#/magic-memory-place-exhibition/

Where do you rest easy?

Magic. A beautiful word, its recorded Western etymology goes back through time from English, to French, Latin, back to the cradle of Western civilization, Greece, and from thence eastwards to civilizations like Persia and the Zoroastrians. In various ways and forms, haven’t all cultures believed in magic?

In that dramatic span of time its meaning has been closely linked to the various cultures that have pressed themselves into the word, and therefore its interpretations have changed dramatically. From divination, to the power of Nature; from harnessing supernatural forces to witchcraft and sorcery, to alternate realities, sleight of hand, and many others, meandering to its current, mysterious lodgings. Which is to say, I’m not sure anybody uses this word much without thinking twice about the consequences. Broadly speaking, science and scientists do not yet include this word in their texts. It is not the tool they use for rational divinations of reality, so we don’t know if magic is alive today, or even if it is, what is it and where might it exist?

Presently, I like to to respond to those hard questions around my specific interests in life, painting, and art by responding that I’m interested in magic. Usually people perk up. Magic? Did he say magic?

Yes. I believe in magic, and some of my paintings are trying to reflect this notion. Here is one example of what I’m talking about:

Is there is a place that is special to you, where, by being there you feel differently? And by some process, let’s call it magic because I do, it interrupts the way you think, stops the looping mental processes that we get caught in like a spiders web, and gives you the space and breadth to relax, expand, and elevate your spirit?

By being in this place you’re physically, perhaps spiritually altered, if only during that time, and for a lingering short time thereafter. That’s one kind of magic. Portal magic. You’re transported to the here and now, and you feel more alive. Know what I’m talking about?

Earthbound

A few months ago I started thinking about death again. At the time I was listening to the stories people close to me told each other when they lose family and friends. Something dryly funny my father mentioned to me over the phone got me thinking. About the larger western culture and its mythologies around dying. As he told it, he was trying to discuss one of the stories that people are told in the larger Christian faith with his Episcopalian Minister. That is, if you behave, or even if you don’t but repent, you can go to a room in the sky, heaven, and meet God and all of your favorite old pals in a 56 billion light year universe. I guess the Minister didn’t really want to touch that.

But look, while that may be true, what do I know - I realized that I am more vegetal and earthbound, meaning, bound to the Earth. I like that our bodily remains become part of the organs of Earth, and She will do with us what She will. Also, nowadays death is largely kept hidden and sanitized in the safer areas of the world. So in that vein I was inspired to paint these two back-to-earth paintings, and place a figure in each one that may be in a process of decay, in a beautiful place of our choosing. That’s another story too, of course, but one I rather like.

earthbound, male figure, acrylic and pencil on canvas, 27” x 28”, 2023

earthbound #2, female figure, acrylic, oil pastel, pencil, and charcoal on canvas, 29” x 26.5, 2023

Ghost Elk: success, sabotage, and magic

What is success? What does that mean for you, success?

I think we can all agree self-destruction is an odd personal strategy, if that’s not really what you’re after. The saboteur in us rather gleefully goes about subtly or overtly creating chaos, and there is a kind of reasoning to it, but why encourage it?

Recently I’ve been saying it’s time to get out of my own way.

At the same time I’ve been thinking about Magic. Not sleight of hand, but rather an uncanny sense of possibilities, of the extraordinary. Of not knowing, or being sure of what’s happening or coming. All the senses heightened, I’m waiting, learning to be patient again.

I took a 12 hour hiking trip with my brother-in-law José and his hunting partner Pat recently, up to 12,000 ft off the Gore Trail, to help them pack out elk meat from a kill José had made the previous week. I experienced many feelings, thoughts, pains, and came back and painted this piece, ghost elk.

ghost elk, acrylic, oil pastel, and pencil on canvas, 27” x 24”, 2022

Where the heart is

It’s not always easy to explain, and perhaps harder to understand, but my heart lives easier in certain places. The land speaks to me, perhaps her memories find an imprint in my work, and I sense mysteries that are left alone to exist. I can locate myself somehow, somewhere, in the way nature and the people express themselves. Perhaps some of you feel the same way.

sea dreams, acrylic, oil pastel & pencil on canvas,
30” x 30”, 2021

the space between, acrylic, oil pastel, & pencil on canvas, 21” x 22”, 2021

San Luis, acrylic, oil pastel & pencil on canvas, 36” x 48”, 2022

returning home, acrylic on canvas, 30” x 30”, 2021

temoy, spirit under the coconut tree, acrylic, oil pastel & pencil on canvas paper, 10” x 14”, 2012

myth of knowledge, acrylic, oil pastel & pencil on canvas, 36” x 48”, 2011

What does the sea level southern Caribbean and high plateau North American west have in common, two of the places my heart resides? I can’t say, but I believe both places adopted me, land and people spoke to me, even healed me.

I am beginning the process of fermentation for a new body of work that I will endeavor to show in Trinidad next year, a show entitled Coming Home. In it I will be exploring ideas around place, people, heritage, and heart.

Nicholas Emery
May 23rd 2022

After the burn

For five years I’ve been observing the forest that was burned in the Cold Springs fire in 2016, near Nederland, Colorado. It’s about a mile from where I live. An entirely new crop of trees have emerged, a process that I find fascinating. From this incredible heat, 800°C (1,472° F) or higher, emerges ephemerals and plants, then grasses, and then the pioneer saplings such as fir, aspen and pine. Some species of pine trees are sealed by a resinous bond which can only be cracked open by the high temperatures associated with wildfire.

Nicholas Emery, new growth, acrylic & oil pastel on canvas, 29” x 23”, 2021

the space between, 21” x 22”, acrylic, oil pastel, & pencil on canvas

In this way, from fire and heat and ash and destruction comes life.

More next time
Nicholas Emery
November 2021

photograph by Nicholas Emery

The truth is a fugitive

The truth is everywhere these days, and nowhere. The truth, like light, is like a fugitive, forever changing, morphing, escaping, and recreating itself. It is the mercurial nature of the human temperament and intellect that makes it so difficult for us to locate the truth, or with any consistency. In the same way light is always shifting, either arriving or leaving, rarely, if ever, remaining the same.

Thus it is our very nature, the tension between light and the dark, the certain and the uncertain, that is the fugitive that lives in all of us.

night prairie, on the nature of nightlight, acrylic on canvas, 40” x 40”, 2021

fog #2, on the nature of daylight, acrylic on canvas, 26” x 28” 2021

More next time
July 2021
Nicholas Emery

Free fall

I created this recent painting from an amalgam of dream experiences and events in my life. After completing the piece I began to think of this question:

At what point do we feel free when we fall?

Is it when we no longer feel as if we are falling, because we have fully committed to the experience, that we feel a sense of liberty?

Of course, I hope you all know I do not mean literally jumping from a cliff, which I used to do as a 20yr old in the old quarries of Vermont.

I’m speaking of metaphorical falling, in which the fear of falling represents a fear of something that we carry within ourselves. I believe it necessitates a ‘leap of faith’ to exorcise one’s particular fear: the experience of falling requires one to be active, and knowingly engage - by jumping.

Perhaps in the descent we find ourselves.

More next time
Nicholas Emery
December 2020

I dream of Magi

I believe in dreams, I mean the kind that come while we slumber.

Recently I dreamt of a powerful woman who appeared, stood before me, and imparted a message .

She told me that my name was no longer Nicholas Emery, but Nicholas Magi.

I argued with her, and with a degree of petulance I insisted I already had a name.

Bemused, she looked at me in a way that imparted my resistance was meaningless. Dream time passed, and she disappeared leaving me to myself.

I remained in the dream and could not rid myself of a feeling that I had somehow betrayed myself. The feeling possessed me. I felt a deep sense of regret.

Still in the dream state, I made a point of telling myself to accept this name, Magi, and uncover its meaning when I awoke.

magi, acrylic on canvas, 30” x 30”, 2020

The next morning I looked the word Magi up. It appears to have manifold meanings and a very long history, dating back to Persia and the Eastern Mediterranean, predating Christianity and the three wise men tale.

The word may originally have meant a practitioner of magic, or someone interested in esoteric knowledge, such as astronomy, astrology, mysticism, and alchemy .

I like that interpretation, who wouldn’t?

Nicholas Emery
August 23, 2020

Garage Painting and The Humility of Mystery

I’ve moved my studio into my garage. I guess I’m a garage painter for the foreseeable future. The pros are it’s clean, it’s available, and since I began my careening career working in a garage many years ago, to quote Yogi Berra, it’s like deja-vu all over again. There are no cons worth mentioning. Frankly, I’d paint in Grandpa’s shed if it came right down to it, and probably have.

In my last blog in January I argued that storytelling is a fundamental part of the human design and an essential ingredient to image makers such as myself.

What I would like to add to that is this: one of the powerful forces in my life, and a driving energy in my work, is what I’d like to call the humility of mystery. What do I mean when I say that? I believe a rich vein of unknowable and mysterious forces have shaped and guided me, and these forces have informed my intellectual curiosity, and have consistently tried to express themselves through me. I found a good tool and friend in paint to do so.

This is not a metaphor for where we find ourselves today, or maybe it is, either way,

More next time
Nicholas Emery
April 13th, 2020

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involuntary paradox, 23” x 17”, acrylic, pencil, and oil pastel on canvas, 2020. By Nicholas Emery

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white wolf, 24” x 17”, acrylic, pencil, and oil pastel on canvas, 2020. By Nicholas Emery. NFS.

sojourner, 21.5” x 21.5”, acrylic and pencil on canvas, 2020. By Nicholas Emery

caging the bat, 20” x 20”, acrylic and pencil on canvas, 2020. By Nicholas Emery

A Contemporary Argument for Art as Storytelling

Well I’m largely a painter, so for the sake of brevity I’ll concentrate on painting.

Paintings are an example of portals into stories, are they not? And for Humans, the importance of storytelling cannot be underestimated - it’s is a vital cog in our way of life.

Breaking it down a little, paintings initially are an engagement of the eyes. As such the image becomes the liminal spaces through which we internally metamorphose what we see, into what we feel, as we begin to grasp the ineffable. Therefore, the importance of painting is the journey the image takes you on, which is paradoxically both deeply personal, and socially symbiotic.

In the past I have often argued with myself that there isn’t any critical verbiage that can be applied to a work that can elicit this unique experience, unless it is told as a story. Terms like the picture plane or trompe l'oeil (French: to deceive the eye) can be interesting up to a point, but unless there is a story behind it - well really, who cares?

Recently I was at the Chicago Institute of Art and found myself standing in front of a Max Beckmann self-portrait. I marveled at the colors, the technique, his expression, the hands.

Max Beckmann self-portrait 1937

However, it wasn’t until I read the curators short biography, really the fledgling beginnings of a story, and began to meditate on part of Beckmann’s history that I went through the portal experience. I knew he was a German Expressionist, and part of Hitler’s Degenerate Art Exhibition, but something else triggered me.

“This self-portrait was perhaps the last painting the artist completed in Berlin before he and his wife fled to the Netherlands on July 20, 1937. Their flight occurred just two days after Adolf Hitler delivered a speech condemning modern art and one day after the opening of the exhibition Degenerate Art, the Nazis’ official denigration of the avant-garde, which included twenty-two of Beckmann’s works. The artist departed Germany just in time: in 1937 more than five hundred of his works were confiscated from public collections”.

Yes, it most likely was the last painting he did before he and his family fled Germany. I began to look at the painting differently, and felt something shift in me. The power of an image in the context of a story.

Nicholas Emery, acrylic on canvas, 2020, Moffat pack in a wolf moon lunar eclipse

My first painting of 2020 was in response to a very recent story I read, sent by an ecologist who has followed my work, particularly my ‘black wolf returns series’ of which I have previously blogged. This particular story was about the first wolf pack to reemerge in Colorado since their extermination in the 1940’s by Federal and State authorities.

Yes, the wolves have found their way back moving south on their own from Wyoming: wild animals will do that - no damn respect for borders - and are making a go of it in Moffat county in the northwestern part of Colorado.

The first full moon of the year is called a wolf moon, and well, you can begin to fill in the rest of this story yourself…

More next month
Nicholas Emery
January 19th, 2020

The controlled wild revisited and other news

Last Saturday, October 26th 2019, was the closing day for the 6 person group show I participated in and helped curate. As you may recall, it was entitled ‘the controlled wild’.

Work by Sara Kinn, Nicholas Emery, and Amy Johnson

Work by Jeremy Ragland and Nicholas Emery

Work by Sara kinn, Amy Johnson, and Nicholas Emery

Work by Emilie Upczak and Nicholas Emery

Work by Amy Johnson and Nicholas Emery

Work by Stephanie Victa

In other news recently Filmmaker and collaborator Emilie Upczak and I received the INSITE Grant from RedLine Contemporary Art Center and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Our project is to create a video installation that will visually explore human industry, expansion, movement, and boundaries, as well as public and private land, wildlife, and wildlife crossing corridors in north Denver.

And finally, I will be in a group show at Now Gallery in Lyons, Colorado in November collaborating with two other artists, Sally King, a wonderfully skilled abstract painter, and Nathan Koral, a very interesting photographer and astronomer, about our experiences and viewpoints while on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, inspired by a trip we took for three weeks together a year ago, in October 2018.

Grand Canyon series: the woman and the lion, acrylic on canvas, 24” x 24” 2018, by Nicholas Emery

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Nicholas Emery
October 28th, 2019.

the controlled wild

The Controlled Wild is a term I thought up in order to name a particular paradoxical condition present in human behavior. This condition is reflected in our conduct and how we occupy land, and how we relate to and interact with other species. It is evident in many parts of the world, but is particularly true in the western United States.

The Controlled Wild in my view, is the tension between the desire for control, for power, and the equal and opposite desire for abandon, for wildness, for freedom from convention. Friedrich Nietzsche chose to use Greek mythology, and the Apollonian (rationality, logic and order) and Dionysian ( chaos, emotion and instinct) tensions to describe this condition in his book The Birth of Tragedy.

In my view, the prolific use of barbed wire on the land in the western United States (of course it has many other applications in numerous places) is an example of this control, a measure of visual and physical supremacy on the land in order to protect the concepts of systemic control, so as to keep domestication in and wildness out, so to speak. This has had an enormous effect on our relationships with each other and with other species. For example, for many people, gone are the days when you can walk to your neighbors house directly, but must first go out to a road, walk it, and then turn in. Imagine how other larger species have to negotiate this ongoing tension.

I began to paint my own interpretation of this and other derivative tensions from The Controlled Wild almost three years ago, and continue to expand on some of my original ideas around land, boundaries, and wildness. Here is an example,

night owl, acrylic on canvas, 21” x 29”, 2019

I have asked five other artists to participate in a group show, and interpret the meaning of The Controlled Wild. It will be interesting to see each artists use of materials and intellectual freedom, and our work in conversation with each other.

More next month
Nicholas Emery
September 22nd, 2019.

The black wolf returns

As someone who thinks of himself as a land artist, I don’t create images that are landscapes very often. Largely what I think about are how humans imprint themselves on land, and what effect this has on us and other species, and so I try to visually articulate that tension.

Wolves became extinct in Colorado (and other western states) in the 1940’s as part of U.S. federal and state efforts for the “destruction of such animals and such plant life that may be detrimental to us,” as articulated by the U.S. National Park Service in 1925.

Over the past decade, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has restored gray wolves into Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Arizona, and some observers believe it's only a matter of time before wolves start migrating into Colorado from the north and south.

I began the ‘black wolf returns’ series in 2017. It began from a conversation I had then with wildlife ecologist Carl Mackey at Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, 11 miles from downtown Denver in Commerce City. I asked him if he thought the wolf's return was imminent to Colorado: he said, “yes, it’s already happening”. 

From that conversation I began to think about the animal corridors that crisscross western states, connecting them, and how wolves might return and what they might see and experience, from their point of view, rather than ours (ranchers, artists, environmentalists, politicians, etc)

black wolf series, the return part 4, acrylic on canvas, 24.5” x 24.5”, 2019

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Nicholas Emery
August 21st, 2019

A new word is born

On a 21 day trip down the Colorado river of Grand Canyon last October 2018 I was musing with some friends about the need for new words to describe Nature. It was largely born out of a sense of frustration and linguistic impotence. I felt there were simply not enough words in the English language to describe the web of such an incalculably rich phenomenon like Nature.

In that particular case I wanted to use a word that described the intelligent qualities of Nature and its unique ability to send messages to all of us, ones that are important for us to understand.

So I created the word mysten, and loosely defined it as an important or even vital message sent by Nature for us to consider. The message could be in the form of a dream, or an animal, or a sound, or a conspiracy of events, and so on. From there I began a series of paintings, and these imaginary creatures arrived.

mysten creation, acrylic on canvas, 4’ x 3’, 2018 by Nicholas Emery

I see these creatures as benevolent, sent to us to act as messengers and intermediaries between ourselves and other animals who we have lost a direct connection with.

From there I began creating imaginary new works on the possibility of human transfiguration - what a complete change of form or appearance into a more animal and spiritual state would look like. This was partly inspired by a moment a few years ago when I was deep in the forest and came upon a bull elk, and this majestic creature stared at me in such a way, unwavering, that I felt I was being spoken to.

transfiguration #1, acrylic on canvas, 35.5” x 25”, 2019

More next month
Nicholas Emery
June 22nd, 2019

A long time coming

It’s been three years since my last post, give or take. I’m not going to try to revisit personal events over the last three years. Rather, I’d like to continue with a once-a-month post, as I used to do, that discusses what’s taking place for me now - that is, some combination of an idea, a place, a vision, a piece of artwork, and so on.

Lately I’ve been on road trips exploring the North American west, the region I live in - and particularly Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico’s high desert, also known as the Colorado Plateau. It’s a rugged place with a rich and varied cultural history that predates the Euro-ethnic expansion beginning in 1492 on the shores of the Bahamas that eventually resulted in the genocide of North American tribal culture.

One such place is Capital Reef National Park, a surreal desert sandstone landscape with rich and fertile soil from the river and creek-water sources there. It was settled thousands of years ago by southwestern tribes, incorrectly named Fremont Indians after the Euro-ethnic explorer John C Fremont, but they were more likely related to the Pueblo, Ute, and Navajo peoples. Mormons settled the area in the early 1900’s and found ancient Indian irrigation ditches for crops there that they reused to plant fruit orchards with that still exist today. I was recently there and ate some delicious pies made from fruit that came directly from some of the nearly 3,000 fruit trees that are maintained by the park service.

One of the great ancestral legacies of the North American west, like the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in southern France, are the rock art petroglyphs and pictographs left by early people. This work interests me for various reasons, but primarily because it exposes a deep and rooted relationship to Nature not easily defined by rational, scientific thought. At its essence, this is what drives my own work.

Capital Reef National Park petroglyph rock art by southwest American ancient peoples, photo by Nicholas Emery, 2019

The paintings I have done in the Mysten series, the creatures of the Mysten (you can learn more about that series on my main page) clearly draw some inspiration from ancient rock art petroglyphs of the southwestern United States.

Acrylic on canvas, 4’ x 3’, 2018 by Nicholas Emery

More next month
Nicholas Emery
April 16, 2019