Nicole James
Nicole James is a Los Angeles-born, Brooklyn-based artist recognized for her chaotic still life paintings.
James’s work rejects the notion that chaos and beauty are opposing forces, and instead seeks to unite them, offering the idea that the raw and unfiltered beauty of disorder is exciting precisely because it is so fleeting and unpredictable.
Drawing jointly on storytelling skills developed in her career as an advertising creative director and a worldview shaped by being born into a generation that makes the ultra-personal public online, James’s work weaves detailed visual narratives that feel both unexpected and relatable. Large and vibrant, her acrylic paintings hijack aesthetic elements of modern photography, pop culture, and self-documentation to create totally novel compositions that invite the viewer to see the beauty in the madness of everyday life.
Collect Bean: What does growth mean to you?
Nicole James: Growth is also chaos, which is precisely what makes it exciting and beautiful.
Like a growing weed, the events of your life unfold outwardly in unpredictable ways, impacted endlessly by uncontrollable outward conditions. Jenny Holzer has a truism that says ‘you live the surprise results of old plans’ which perfectly captures the idea that even the things you accomplish are different from the things you originally set out to do. You grow, and you change, but not necessarily in the ways that you set out to when you decided that you were going to grow and change - instead, you grow and change in response to the rhythm of the universe that happens after you’ve made that decision, shaped by factors outside of your control. Chaos!
Collect Bean: If you had to describe your work in only three words, what would they be?
Nicole James: Chaos is beautiful.
Collect Bean: How do you decide on the subject matter for a painting?
Nicole James: I spend a lot of time observing naturally occurring moments of disorder for inspiration and then working to push those visually through composition and color choices. My work is a reverent take on the grotesque and a sort of sarcastic inversion of Cartier-Bresson's Decisive Moment, where time is paused at just the wrong moment: the intersection of attraction and aversion. Real life offers up almost nonstop inspiration for that kind of thing, so it’s more a matter of whittling down ideas than searching them out.
Collect Bean: What is the kindest thing someone can tell you about your work?
Nicole James: I absolutely live for details and invest a lot of time in them when painting. When someone notices a particular small detail that I really lavished attention on, and mentions it to me, it’s my absolute favorite. I never feel more seen than when people notice the small stuff.
