Nicole Finger, hyperrealist painter
The appeal of melting ice cream cones and glazed donuts, her path to photorealism, and when her paintings went to the moon
There’s lots of research about how our guts and brains are connected in surprising and complex ways. What I know for sure is my brain is controlled by my stomach, which is why Palate & Palette includes menus for each story, why I can’t waste a meal on so-so food, and why I am so excited about Nicole Finger’s paintings. An email featuring one of her donut paintings piqued my interest (and a run to Brother’s Brew for a chocolate-glazed beauty). Then I saw her painting of tacos with pickled onions, salsa, charred peppers, and a sprinkle of cotija with a tang I could taste nestled into griddled and blistered tortillas:
And this blueberry galette:
Nicole paints more than just these insanely delicious-looking treats. Read on to see more of her amazing hyperrealist art and the story of how it came to be.
Tell me about your Temptation series.
After doing a figurative series involving water and wet skin and hair, I found I truly loved the common thread of painting reflective qualities such as eyes and water. I thought food would be a perfect foil for that. I always believed in painting what you know, and my parents were total foodies. Food was their religion [I relate to this]. My mom is a very natural Southern Italian cook and my father was obsessed with good food, fine dining, and even the best, most authentic, of even very low-brow food.
The Instagram craze of photographing food also piqued my interest in painting food. I found it funny that people would photograph their food before they ate it. I definitely understood the alluring elements of food—the color, composition, and reflective and textural qualities. Food can be very beautiful and sensual—why NOT paint it? It’s the most universal subject and everyone has attachments and memories around food.
I began working on a food series and sent them off to Skidmore Contemporary Art in 2018. That led to a show there. Then I recently created another Temptation series.
When you're composing these paintings, are you setting up still lifes of towers of donuts, or ice cream cones, or takeout from a taco joint?
I work from photographs that I take, or I will start with an image I find on the Internet and crop it or flip it and change colors and backgrounds. [I was hoping for all these treats to be scattered about her studio for research and sampling.]
So, you don't actually sample the foods that you're painting?
That would be a problem [she says, smiling].
There's this trend of hyperrealism in actual cake making. People are making cakes that look like shoes, or dogs, or clothing. You see videos of the big reveal— they cut them open to show they are actually cakes. Does that mess with your head, given that you are painting hyperrealistic cakes?
Isn't that funny? I've thought about that as well.
Have you ever taken the process all the way through where you baked a cake and decorated it and then made a painting of it?
I haven't done that. They don't last long enough! [At first I thought she meant the cake would be quickly consumed, but later learned that her paintings take many weeks to create.] I think it would be like Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. The cake would have spiderwebs on it by the time I completed it.
Can you talk about how your unique photorealistic style came about?
I have a classic art background of painting plein air and working from life. I've painted my whole life and I got tighter and tighter [more detailed and crisp] as time went on. For some people, it's the other way around.
After years of doing more gestural realism, my work started getting more hyperrealistic. I wanted to be more deliberate and controlled with my painting because it was more accessible to stop and start midway [while being in the thick of childraising]. As my children became teenagers, it was very meditative when I felt I had very little control elsewhere!
I came upon Alyssa Monks who was doing mind-blowing realistic figurative work but not at the cost of the paint texture. I took a workshop from her at the New York Academy of Art and there was no looking back from photorealism.
How do you find the sweet spot of making something hyperrealistic while giving it life and mood and artfulness?
I want to create paintings that elicit an emotional response, and they are less about making a statement.
With photorealism, a lot of it is the skillset and the challenge of creating something to look visually real. But what's the point if you're not expressing anything? Sometimes I don't even know what I'm going after in the beginning. It’s a gut feeling, and as I paint, that takes over. These paintings take weeks and weeks of work, and the narrative and the feeling come to me while I'm painting.
Now, no matter what my subject matter is, I paint in a photorealistic style, but I always strive to preserve some texture of the paint involved to give a nod to the medium and the hand of the artist to keep the life blood and expression of the piece alive. It isn’t always easy when you’re using tinier and tinier brushes to achieve hyperrealism, but there’s a lot of emotional subtext that I don’t want to lose because I’m painting in this way.
I'm creating the narrative in my head, and it may have changed from my idea in the beginning. I always feel a little uneasy when people say one of my paintings looks just like a photograph. Obviously, they're complimenting it, but I hope they got a little bit more than just that, because otherwise, what’s the point?
Can you tell me about the phases of your painting?
Once I get an idea for a painting, I either search for the imagery for the food paintings or for my figurative work, or I set up a photo shoot. If I’m doing a photo shoot, I will consider props, models, and background, and then just let it happen.
I may make some adjustments to the photos, such as adding other imagery. Then I transfer the drawing to the canvas using carbon paper. Next, I do a sepia underpainting. Then I start working in full color. I generally work it carefully, section by section, but sometimes I will block in color and then work at until I get it fully defined. I use a bit of glazing and layers in places as well.
Are most of your pieces large?
Yes, generally they are in a 30” to 40” range. The largest ones I’ve done were 5 by 6 feet and were loose [more suggestive and less detailed], large paintings of horses.
Tell me about your painting Empty Nested.
It seems that at some point artists have to do a self-portrait. I had never really wanted to, but I was working on a series featuring my children. When I finished that series, my daughter was already in college and my son was about to leave for college.
I realized it was time to paint myself and the theme of empty nested was obvious. I explored that symbolically with animals as family members, and my surroundings here in Colorado.
How does how your environment in Telluride, Colorado, influence your art?
Telluride is a magical place. We are surrounded by 14,000-foot peaks. We've lived here for 30 years and raised our kids here. We recently moved out of town and we look out at Mount Wilson, and it's the most stunning view I've ever seen.
I had done some landscape painting when I was younger, but it always kind of bored me, even though I know it can be done beautifully and expressively. With my latest series of floralscapes, I found a contemporary twist on mixing domestic florals with the [mountainous] background.
These paintings were a statement on the fleetingness of life. There is the contrast between the flowers, which are going to be gone in a week, and these incredible mountains that have been here forever, and will be here after us.
Your work also features the environment and your children.
Yes, I also did figurative work with my children as the muses. The series is about how our youth are shaped and informed by their natural environment and how and if they can optimally coexist.
It seems that you are fortunate your children are willing to be your models. Tell me more about that series.
Whether they're willing or not, they're going to be! My daughter was a theater major, so she is the perfect muse. She will let me throw her in an icy river, do a crazy pose, wear a ridiculous outfit— she is all in and knows how to hit the right mood. And my son was a competitive mogul skier. They are both so entrenched in the mountain life and it’s such a definitive part of who they are that I wanted to express that.
I also wanted to express things that they went through, all the push and pull of insecurities and tumultuous emotion and seeking independence. This is why I paint, because it helps me further distill and understand things that I don’t always articulate as well [in words].
My “Concealment Series” employed veils, sunglasses, etc. to create a visual and psychological barrier. I then started to place the subject within these natural landscapes to show how they’ve been shaped and informed by their environment and also make an allusion to this generation’s relationship and important role to our fragile environment.
What are you working on now?
I'm about to start something very exciting for me: I'm working in collaboration with a war photographer from London who moved to Ukraine. He is documenting the situation there and is raising money for the people of Ukraine. I'm going to paint some of his imagery, and all the proceeds will go to the people of Ukraine.
How did your paintings end up on Nasa’s new rocket as part of the Lunar Codex?
I'm on an art platform, PoetsArtists. I've been in several juried shows and publications with the curator, Didi Menendez. Samuel Peralta, who is a science fiction writer, filmmaker, and physicist, curated one of the shows that I had a piece in. As the Lunar Codex expanded, I was lucky to have three pieces included from other publications.
Peralta took it upon himself to fund payloads that were going to go on these launches to the moon through NASA. He paid for that because he wanted to send art in a digital form from artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers. About 30,000 works are included.
Prior to this, the only representation of artists on the moon was in the 1960s. Andy Warhol was one of the artists featured. This is the first time women artists were included. I can also tell my kids they're up on the moon!
Tell me about your wearable art.
That started with a fundraiser for an AIDS benefit here in Telluride—a big, choreographed extravaganza. I painted a couple of giant, wild wedding dresses that a friend designed. After I painted them, I realized: I can't just give these to someone else to wear, I have to wear them! I was out there on the catwalk. I’ve always been a bit of a closet performer, but I have no rhythm. It was still a lot of fun.
After that, I started doing more of these dresses for a fundraiser for a community art center in Telluride called Ah Haa. Every year I’d paint a real dress based on a painting from a master artist. I did a Klimt, a Rousseau, and a Mucha on dresses. I just painted roses on a dress that I wore for my show opening in Santa Fe in October.
How different is it to paint on a dress than on a canvas?
A canvas is on stretcher bars, but you can't do that with a dress because that would ruin it, so it’s more difficult. I make a cardboard dress-shaped form to put the dress on, and as I paint it kind of sticks in place! And I generally paint with oils, but I used acrylics with the dresses, and struggled with how fast it dries.
I read that both of your parents influenced your art in different ways. Can you talk about that?
My mother was an art teacher and an artist. I grew up watching her paint in the little extended boiler room downstairs. It was the only free space and it was well lit and warm. She was always taking me to museums and galleries when I was a child. It was a natural progression from watching her do it to doing it myself. I was painting or drawing, all through high school.
My dad was an attorney, but he appreciated art and encouraged me to paint horses when I was aspiring to be a professional artist after college. This is because, aside from food, his other big passion was racehorses. He owned many when I was growing up in Maryland and he used to take me to the track and stables. After I graduated college [University of Colorado, Boulder] I remember him saying, “You’ve got to paint the horses. Everyone loves the horses.”
Later he went through five rough years with cancer and died from it. After he passed, I started painting horses. It was cathartic. It felt like he was there with me. That’s when it became professional for me. I started painting these horses, and I did horse after horse after horse. It became a series and I started showing professionally. That first show sold out.
Was there ever any question about you being an artist as opposed to some other career direction?
I was a very shy kid unless I was with my inner circle. I wasn't good at sports, I was klutzy, and I was terrified of math [wait, is she talking about me?]. Art was my happy place, and I was getting a lot of attention for it. When I think back to when I was a child, I loved to do very intricate, detailed art projects. If there was ever a class project involving art—watch out, because I’m in my element and it’s going to be the best damn diorama or book cover ever created!
What would you say is the best advice and the worst advice that you received about being an artist?
My father-in-law said it best: Just paint. The worst advice was any of the hard and fast rules, the “you cant’s.” If you have to keep in mind all the things people say you shouldn’t do, it really stifles your enthusiasm and expression.
Who are artists or creative people that you admire?
The first artist that I just totally fell in love with when I started taking art seriously in high school was Wayne Thiebaud. I was fascinated by his thick, luscious handling of paint, especially his dessert and food paintings. The paint was just like frosting, which was so well suited for the subject matter. I was so entranced by the concept of elevating simple subject matter with the use of light, form, color, and texture.
I also loved Diego Rivera and Thomas Hart Benton. There are also many realist artists I admire: Alyssa Monks, Bo Bartlett, Will Cotton, Anna Weyant, Mary Jane Ansell, Nicolas Sanchez, and Kathrin Longhurst.
Lightening round questions
Favorite breakfast. Cereal—a healthy kind with berries. It's like a religious routine.
If tomorrow was your birthday and I was going to bake you a cake, what kind of cake should it be? Chocolate and vanilla, with crispy icing on the outside. I have very childish dessert tastes.
Most memorable meal. Anytime I have fresh grilled fish tacos by the sea it is memorable.
You're hosting a dinner party and you get to invite six people living or dead. Who do you want to have around the table and what are you going to serve them? Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Julia Child, Barack Obama, President Zelenskyy, Prince Harry, and Sarah Silverman just to spice things up. I would also include my dad because he was a bon vivant at any dinner party and he appreciated a good meal. I don't like to cook, so I would have the chef from my dad’s favorite restaurant in Florence prepare steak Florentine with a good Italian wine, a misto salad, a hunk of Parmesan, and some gelato with little Italian cookies.
Favorite piece of art that you own. My husband is from South Africa and his aunt was the famous art dealer Linda Givon of Goodman Gallery. We ended up with a maquette of David Brown’s life-size Procession. It’s a chaotic parade of medieval, gladiatorial, and drunken figures and a dog. It’s about war and battle, but it has a sense of whimsy to it that I love.
Do you have any paintings that you've made that you would not want to sell?
This one behind me of my son [Freedom, below], I might have to keep. And the small piece of my daughter with the veil where she's staring straight on.
What kind of art is hanging in your bathroom? A piece of African beaded artwork and a shell art surfboard by my artist friend, Forest Melchoir.
Most captivating museum visit. I was at the Met when I was 18 and saw a Winslow Homer show. I think it had a huge influence on me. When I was a little younger than that, I saw Michelangelo's David. That's a cliche answer, but how does stone look like skin?
Palate & Palette menu for Nicole
If Nicole and her husband came to dinner, here’s what I would serve them:
Cauliflower salad with dates and pistachios
Chicken tortilla soup
Chocolate cake with movie-starring frosting
Where to find Nicole (and you should!)
Victory Contemporary, 124 W Palace Ave., Santa Fe, NM
Skidmore Contemporary Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., B-4, Santa Monica, CA
Wow...the food pics are amazing....I'm getting hungry now 😋
Thanks so much Amy! Love it!