Felicity Nutt
Degree: BA Hons Fine Art
University: Aberystwyth University
Graduation Year: 2022
New Blood Art Commentary
2022 graduate Felicity Nutt makes elegant, show-stopping paintings in a range of scales. Colour, brushwork and shape are all arrainged: the painter’s construction site. Compositionally, there will often be a focal point toward and from which the energy of the painting rushes. The brushwork emanates from the heart of colour; Felicity's intuitive process as a painter takes centre-stage. The dynamism is sometimes more crystallised (see the more collaged ‘Walking Sparks’), sometimes more in transition (see ‘Murmuration’).
They recall early paintings by perhaps the most famous living abstract painter, Gerhard Richter, with their intense knowledge of colour. The rhythm of the large and simple elements of Felicity’s paintings is so important: it’s the motion of the chosen colours articulating themselves from each other. The vocabulary of her paintings is a reverie: it's the description – verbal to match visual – that reaches out from itself, opalescent, mellifluous, tussling into awareness.
Artist Statement
Starting as a figurative landscape painter, I am now an abstract painter influenced by European and American Modernist abstraction. My process is intuitive, and I like to keep possibilities open to allow the paint and process to surprise me. This allows moments of paint to play out on canvas that strike a subconscious chord. These moments establish the energy and feeling of a painting. The organisation of my paintings often recreates a sensation of movement and rhythm within space, which has been organically informed by experiences in my immediate surroundings. The landscape, therefore, still plays a key role. There is also a deep consideration of the relationship between colours. By focusing on the interaction between colours, I strive to give colour its own autonomy. I want to reach beyond the association of colour as superficial to arrive at an internal luminosity reflective of nature. My work can be summed up by its dynamic sensations in both colour and the organisation of form. But ultimately, it’s the mystery of painting, of not knowing what’s going to happen that keeps me coming back to the studio day after day.