bio and artists statement


CONTACT
please contact me at nicole@nicoleboitos.com 

BIO
After her childhood in the midwest, Nicole M Boitos moved to Philadelphia in 1993 to earn several degrees in fine art and to establish her studio. Primary mediums include large format oil on canvas, copper etching and engraving, wood engraving, mixed mediums on paper, watercolor and public mixed-media murals. She has collaborated with many notable artists and musicians on an array of projects: creating art for album covers (Michael Gira/The Body Lovers/Swans, Insect Ark, Bee & Flower, James Blackshaw, Human Greed/Fragile Pitches, John 3:16, Tzadik, Pants Exploder, Korperschwache, Jarboe, Neurosis, A Storm of Light and Red Sparowes), hand-drawn animated sequences for video, illustrations for magazines, and promotional materials (logos, posters, t-shirt graphics). Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including live painting performances with Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo and Marco Il Bue Schiavo of the Italian experimental band Larsen.

Boitos Hayworth also works as a freelance commercial illustrator and storyboard artist for multiple advertising agencies in New York and Europe.  Currently, however, she is working as a professional tattoo artist in Suffolk, UK. 

ARTISTS STATEMENT
As an inquisitive child, drawing was just my way of documenting what was around me, what was in me...what I saw, regardless of the actual tangibility of these things. Transcribing visually that which I could not naturally perceive with my senses. Not much has changed since I was five, just the expansion of my vocabulary and visual language skills. I wasn't serious about any of this until high school when I was first introduced to printmaking while taking classes at a university. Printmaking is a rather indirect process, meaning what mark you make upon the stone or the metal plate is not an end-result in itself. The stages, instead of diluting the creative process, provide me with many opportunities to manipulate the work. As many layers of line exist as layers of intent. I can draw a delicate, wonderful little thing which a breath could seemingly disintegrate, then etch it in hard, cold metal - a material which has as much compositional integrity as does the image. 
Oil painting has been attractive to me in recent years since it is exactly the opposite: I work intuitively, directly, organically - the elements meld together with the help of a loose brush and many translucent layers.
The major theme, or force, in my work is conflict/struggle/resolution. I primarily use animals as vehicles for this rather simple metaphor. I question our ability to deeply empathize with images of human suffering. We change the channel when we are asked to save a neglected child, but wince and coo when asked to save a wounded animal. In animal life we remain open and perceptive of tragedy, of pain...and with that our spirits can still identify on a profound level. I don't believe by nature we are humans - "modern man" has stopped communicating directly with instinct, constantly robbing ourselves of internal credibility. Animals are everything we will not allow ourselves to be - good and bad.

"STILL LIVES" SERIES STATEMENT
"Still Lives are not about violence, but that moment precisely after an act has been committed – when inertia ends and person becomes object. The consequent stillness renders the act itself inconsequential. Any specifics to the cause are intentionally vague, and the exclusion of details engages the viewer as a participant.

The series breaks from traditional treatments of female nudes. These works are without glorification of sexuality or sensuality, and avoid opulence. The beauty is found in the figure’s form, making identity irrelevant.

Claustrophobic, unflinching and spontaneous snap-shot inspired composition highlights the raw shock of discovery found in the un-staged truth of crime scene photography. Flesh is illuminated not by soft, ambient light but by the harsh flare of a flash bulb. The over-sized canvas consumes and constrains the viewer’s field of vision, as if through a camera lens. One is committed to the subject matter: your gaze cannot be cast upward or downward, only at.

Beauty transcends the circumstances in which it is found."