Black Rock Desert “Work” Appears in WNCC Fallon Gallery

“Work,” a Naomi Nickerson collection of paintings and drawings of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, will hang in the Virgil Getto Hall Gallery at Western Nevada Community College Fallon Monday, Jan. 29, through Friday, Feb. 16.

“Nevada’s many mountain ranges, hidden springs and bleached playas offer great fodder for the landscape painter,” Nickerson said. “It is Nevada’s vastness, the singular way the sky touches, uninterrupted and harmoniously, the curved horizon so far away from where I stand that makes Nevada so charming and bucolic.”

Painting is the most effective form of communication Nickerson knows. “I paint landscapes because we exist in a landscape,” she adds. “We interact with the landscape every day whether it is in a hostile, loving or merely objective way. By existing in our environment from the very first to the very last of our breaths, we change it and are changed by it.”

Nickerson engages in a sort of visual conversation when making her paintings. “Landscape painting is daunting; even the most expressive and impressionist landscape painted remains at its core stubbornly mundane or emotionally maudlin and grandiose,” she said. “It is a landscape painter’s task to convey the uniqueness, not only of the specific environment, but of the intimate moment in time.”

She holds a bachelor’s degree in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Maryland Institute College of Art.

An artist reception in the gallery will be Wednesday, Jan. 31, 4:30-6:30 p.m.

Press Release: January 18, 2007

“Mars” by Naomi Nickerson, 2006.