Nicole Strasburg

1966 -

represented by The Loft Galeria

Nicole Strasburg was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1966. In the early 1970’s, the Strasburg family moved to Santa Barbara, California when Nicole’s father accepted a position at the University as a set and lighting design instructor. He had studied as a painter and received a degree in painting from the University of Utah. Nicole was greatly influenced by her father as a painter; the act of his painting, the solitary intimacy, the smell of turpentine, and the proximity to creative people all worked to ignite a creative spark in her mind.

Nicole was initially drawn to mathematics and had tentative sights set on a career in engineering. In her junior year of high school, however, Nicole was taken from a beginning drawing course and put directly into an advanced placement class. She worked primarily in graphite creating portraits of friends and of her self to master the art of drawing, At the urging of her art instructor, she completed an artist’s portfolio during her senior year to help gain entrance into a university. Nicole applied for and won a fellowship to the College of Creative Studies art department at UCSB. Still working primarily in graphite, it wasn’t until her junior year of college that she began her “long struggle with learning how to use oil and color.” Nicole completed a bachelor of arts degree in painting and drawing at UCSB and a few years later she spent a semester abroad in Paris, France.

Nicole’s work is increasingly sought after by collectors and has appeared on the cover and within the Sundance catalog as a popular sales item. Her aptitude with numbers compliments the business of marketing and making a living from art. Combining her left and right brain talents has made Nicole Strasburg a very successful living artist.

Nicole Strasburg’s paintings depict a reverence for nature. They are studied and focused showing how the artist spent time in meditation of a particular scene or environment. Nicole’s paintings pay homage to land, sea, and sky and share the moment of reverie she experienced in nature. While her work is not a direct translation of what she visually witnessed, it is a record of her inner world and how it was touched by a particular pairing of sea and sky or changing light on a grass covered mountain. An avid swimmer, Nicole’s close relationship to and understanding of water combines with her artistic vision to create intimate portraits of water’s ever-changing look.

The environments that Nicole records can evolve into abstract shapes, colors and brushstrokes. It is the paring down and minimalizing of shapes that give her images a contemporary look and not that of a traditional landscape artist. She describes her own work as “…impressionistic with a contemporary edge.”.Nicole has a unique technique for painting and materials:

“I choose to work on birch panels because they are easily manipulated by wiping, sanding, scraping, and drawing. My process of building the image becomes as much about putting on the paint as it is removing it. This process creates depth and movement between the layers of paint while keeping the surface of the painting relatively smooth.”

The process of applying the paint and then removing it echoes the ebb and flow of the ocean tides evident in so many of Nicole’s paintings. Also evident is the precision and exactness of Nicole’s mathematical mind that is beautifully tempered by intuition and an emotional sensitivity to her surrounding environment.

By Susan Bush and courtesy of Sullivan
Goss an American Gallery


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