Provided by Reynolds Fine Fine Art
“Into the Mist,” acrylic on canvas.
Kansas-born and Illinois-raised Margot Nimiroski remembers the first time she saw the ocean. She was in Sandy Hook, New Jersey. She was 16 years old and prone to fall in love.
She did precisely that: with the ocean.
Decades later, after 26 years of service teaching pre-school special-ed kids in New Haven, she has taken up a new profession and expressed that former love in 15 large acrylic-on-canvas paintings inspired by the harbor in Branford, where she lives.
On Friday evening, dozens of people braved the water falling from the sky outside to see how Nimiroski handled the ocean water on her canvases that adorned Reynolds Fine Art on Orange Street.
It was the opening reception for “Making Waves: Margot Nimiroski,” the artist’s first solo show in New Haven.
“Wild Waves VI,” acrylic on canvas.
Nimiroski described herself as a self-educated artist. Her reading about Jackson Pollock gave her a kind of permission she said, including to use house paint for her canvases.
She cited other artists on whose shoulders she stands, including J.M. Turner, Winslow Homer, and Helen Frankenthaler. But “I want to create my own style,” she said. “I’m 65, I figured I should get going. I have another 25 to 30 years to paint. I’m a very lucky person.”
The series of 15 ocean or harbor views on display have been completed in the last 14 months, she said. All use house paint that Nimiroski applies with sponges, spackling knives, and other non-traditional instruments.
And they’re big, many on stretched canvas five feet by five feet. “I’m tall,” Nimiroski said, so reach is not an issue, although she does the work with the canvas spread out beneath her on the floor, she added.
“Rolling Waves,” acrylic on canvas.
All begin with a base or wash of a layer of green and black Benjamin Moore or a similar brand. Over that she layers whites and other colors to create moods and mists and curls and foam, the whole range of what water does when it meets a solid with force and velocity.
Overhead the light shining down on the maritime show is also very important to Nimiroski.
“I saw the water for the first time at sixteen, and I never stopped loving it,” she said.
As she greeted guests and admirers and looked out the window at the drenching downpour, Nimiroski added that absolutely anything about water is OK with her, any form, any time, anywhere.
What’s striking about Nimiroski’s visual take on water is that while her canvases aim at displaying a variety of moods, in all of them the ocean is quiet. Her harbor beneath an almost blinding high gloss sky is soft and hushed, and even when her waves are clearly thrashing the breakwater, you don’t hear them.
That is, the synesthesiacal effect of her work is calming, a bit like the voice and demeanor of the former pre-school teacher herself.
Next steps? “I want to get larger,” she said, meaning she wants to create canvases double the size of the ones in the show.
With a second career gaining moment and a studio in Erector Square, she has interest from designers, she said, including from those folks who need art for lobbies and other places, many likely by the sea.