Margaret Nomentana
Untitled 8, Acrylic on paper, 22" x 30"
Margaret Nomentana makes non-objective paintings and collages. She began painting seriously in the early 1970’s, before moving to Los Angeles to join the Feminist Studio Workshop. At the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. where she received awards in Painting and Design. She holds a MFA from Goddard College, a MA in Sociology from the New School for Social Research, and a Professional Certificate in Interior Design, from UCLA.
In 1994, Nomentana moved to the White Mountains of Western Maine, where she enjoys the solitude of her studio in the woods. She is also a part-time New Yorker, and She enjoys teaching art at the local library.
Her paintings are in private collections in Maine and across the country.
Nomentana was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland.
Statement:
My paintings and collages are abstract landscapes of the mind, infused with the light of Maine's changing seasons and my own emotional weather. Working primarily with acrylic paint, I navigate formal concerns: spatial relationships, color, shape and line. My work is bathed in music, my constant companion in the studio. Artmaking for me always involves longing and discovery, an exploration of self through the visual world.
Working on the floor, I fabricate painted pieces in order to construct non-objective collages. Through tearing, cutting, scratching, scrunching, these segments become unique objets, ready to be glued to paper or canvas. I exercise total control over their materiality and visual form. I caress them with my hands, partnering with them as I situate them on the picture plane where they will coexist with whatever other objets the surface may contain. Investigations and configurations constantly interact with and play off of one another, until my objets come to their final destination.
My process is both intuitive and informed. It begins without preliminary sketches or concepts, with only the most tenuous of ideas in play. I am always manipulating, responding to, and interacting with what I see in front of me. I work on multiple pieces at once, dancing into and around the spaces of my art. Along the way, I add or subtract shapes and colors, in dialogue with whatever my thoughts of the moment might be.
I see collage-making as a way to choreograph visual form, where the aesthetically interesting gradually becomes pictorial reality. From quirky abstract shapes, large physical gestures, or tiny specks, surprises always occur. I want my paintings to be human in scale and to carrying many meanings in a fragmented, absurd world of their own that may or may not mirror reality.
I probe the interactions between calligraphic markings, architectural references, street art, plant forms, decorative flourishes and anthropomorphic images, all swirling and swimming in a universe in flux. My configurations may be anomic, funny or perverse, and sometimes verge on the narrative. My eccentric and diverse forms may carry diverse meanings, or no meaning at all. I want to create work that is intriguing and pleasing, with my strong minimalist impulse tempered by a dry sense of humor, and a powerful sense of hope. In these times of plague and governmental dysfunction, art is my lodestar.
