Artist Biography:  Born in 1979 the son of a painter, NicEllis Withey learned about art and painting at a young age. His childhood blended Rembrandt and Titian with sesame street and He-Man cartoons. He began consciously studying art early in high school and began exhibiting his work by the age of sixteen.

He studied painting, sculpture, printmaking, and philosophy at college eventually earning his MFA in painting from the University of Buffalo. Influenced by the European masters, Julie Heffernan, and Georges Bataille to name a few, his work blends Baroque theatricality and mannerist attenuation with an innate whimsy and often dark humor.

Artist’s Statement: Of his recent work he says. “I draw much of my work out of a decontextualized dialogue with painting from the renaissance, mannerist and baroque traditions. I have a fascination with paintings of that period, as objects pulled from their historical context, in which meaning has largely atrophied into opacity leaving a complex and engaging visual puzzle. These works were created to be read, with a complex lexicon of symbols and associative meanings now useless the best of these paintings plead almost mutely for interpretation. For me these works take on a character that is almost monstrous, both powerful and pathetic in the strength of their insistence and the depths of their impotence. I attempt in my work to create a contemporary expression of this unique space.“

More from the artist, NicEllis Withey: I draw much of my work out of a decontextualized dialogue with painting from the renaissance, mannerist and baroque traditions.  I have a fascination with paintings of that period, as objects pulled from their historical context, in which meaning has largely atrophied into opacity leaving a complex and engaging visual puzzle.  These works were created to be read, with a complex lexicon of symbols and associative meanings now useless the best of these paintings plead almost mutely for interpretation.  For me these works take on a character that is almost monstrous, both powerful and pathetic in the strength of their insistence and the depths of their impotence.

I attempt in my work to create a contemporary expression of this unique space, or at least my impression of it.  In order to do this I utilize a model similar to surrealist practice, in that the surrealists used elements derived from the subconscious and random occurrence to derail the rational content of their work.  I take a somewhat less strict approach. I think that as my project gets its genesis from a place of slippage of the rational rather than from its absence I should reflect that blending of the considered and the irrational.  I also, like the surrealists, make use of a Freudian and post Freudian framework. In my case however I use this lens to observe paintings divorced from their reasoned signifiers, and to attempt to reproduce their effect.

My working method reflects this desire to defy readability, while at the same time evoking the structure of the readable.  I find tools for this within the practices of the painting itself.  For example where meaning is lost to symbolism because its exterior referents are lost or confused, I substitute a referent that is entirely personal relying upon the structure and context of symbolism to convey the insistence of meaning where none can exist for the viewer. 

The Primary focus of my recent work has been to explore the ambiguous spaces, and contradictions within the language of portraiture.  Portraiture in specific maintains many of the same structures and tools for creating meaning that are used in the other genre of art contemporary with it, but it adapts them to suit its own requirements and limitations.  In the specifics of portraiture I have found more tools to create the sort of opaque narrative that fascinates me.  The structures of symbolism become more tightly codified to meet the needs of an art form subjugated to the needs of likeness.  This concretizing of symbolic context allows me more free play, in that any object placed in the hand of a portrait subject will be read as symbolic.  So too has the simple requirement placed on portraiture by the relative social importance of the sitters verses that of a paid model offered me means to frustrate narrative.  I use the fracturing found where an important sitters head, and or hands, has been placed onto a model or studio dummy by allowing the breaks in painting sessions to show and intentionally disturbing the usual rhythm of painting.  I also play off the tension in portraiture between likeness and pictorial space, by contrasting the visual mass of my figure to the push and pull of environment becoming background becoming backdrop. 

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