Two Hundred Pink Paintings & One Pea Green 

Watercolors by Nick Vaaler

 

Two Hundred Pink Paintings & One Pea Green hopes to project the importance of color, quantity, and cohesion within Nick’s work. These paintings attempt to explore meditations on repetition within ridged compositional structure and arbitrary rules. Laying out a language of rules to abide by for each painting allows Nick to create work in two roles. First, as its conceptual parent, conceiving of the idea, and second, as its manufacturer. This is abundantly clear in the process of creating his button cards, which follow a factory like structure of production. 

Traditional button cards from the past are a beautiful representation of old world mass production, each with their own unique marking and printing methods, superfluous factory information unimportant to the average consumer, and comical self-referential imagery simply to display even just one button. Nick has always been intrigued by the idea of hand made mass production, and it has become a major portion of his artistic practice.   

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Farewell, Pea Green 

Watercolors by Nick Vaaler

 

Farewell, Pea Green is a follow up to Nick's last solo exhibition, Two-Hundred Pink Paintings & One Pea Green. This work similarly attempts to explore what it means to be confined by a strict set of rules. Painted entirely between January 2nd & April 14th, Nick worked in a stream of consciousness, allowing his sometimes arbitrary rules of composition, structure, scale, etc. to remove a portion of the decision making process. This, along with his use of an extremely limited pallet, let the work, both good and bad, flow out quickly and organically with little filtration. His button cards, which follow a theory of hand made mass production, are where ideas often get digested from sketch to full composition. Nick likes to work in two separate states, a state of conception, and a state of manufacturing. Conception may be chaos. Manufacturing is meditation. 

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For more information on Nick and his work visit https://www.nickvaaler.com/