Nichole Rae Klein

Nichole Rae Klein’s oil and egg tempera paintings blend ordinary beings and unearthly flourishes. Those timeless materials, in particular, add a tension to the artist’s scenes and portraits. The painter says her process is time consuming, but the “slowness provides me enough time to look around the scene and notice what my subject might have missed during their attempt to keep everything under control. My paintings describe actions and emotion that come just before catastrophe,” the artist says. “I am looking for the boundary where safety and fear lies. I paint control slipping through my subject’s fingers and pooling in offsetting signs around the image. I like them looming there, a series of dots my subject is trying to connect. Sometimes, my subject isn’t in the painting. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s you, the viewer.”