NICOLE
IRENE
ANDERSON
“I create paintings and drawings that convey a collective uneasiness and human vulnerability reflective of our current times. I explore complex questions of land, home, and the psychological impact of expansion in the American West through the language of the landscape centered around my home state of California.”
Working in oil, casein, and drawing media, Nicole Irene Anderson creates paintings and drawings that convey collective uneasiness and human vulnerability reflective of our current times. She explores complex questions of land, home, and the psychological impact of expansion in the American West through the language of the landscape centered around her home state of California. These contemplative works bring forth multiple associations and conflicting emotions regarding our environment: the often personal and tender memories of home, the comfort and beauty of the ordinary landscape, painful histories, and the anxieties of living in a world forever altered by human-caused climate change.
Anderson travels to locations throughout California, searching for areas that elicit a response triggering the nervous system where environmental damage, human alteration, or architectural remnants of the past are noticeable. She documents these visual tensions between pain and beauty with her camera and uses the photographs as source material for her compositions. These everyday places become visual metaphors for more significant societal and environmental concerns, advocating for empathy and care that should be practiced for the land we inhabit.
About the Artists
Nicole Irene Anderson (b. 1993) earned a B.F.A. in Painting/Drawing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and is a current M.F.A. candidate at the University of California, Davis. The artist has participated in exhibitions at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (San Luis Obispo, CA); the Museum of Sonoma County (Santa Rosa, CA); the David Brower Center (Berkeley, CA); and Root Division (San Francisco, CA). Anderson has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the Discovered: Emerging Visual Artist Grant from Creative Sonoma. Her practice was recently covered in Sonoma Magazine, and her work has been documented in catalogs and published in the Pacific Coast edition of New American Paintings, no. 157. Anderson currently lives and works in Davis and Santa Rosa, California.
Working in oil, casein, and drawing media, Nicole Irene Anderson creates paintings and drawings that convey a collective uneasiness and human vulnerability reflective of our current times. She explores complex questions of land, home, and the psychological impact of expansion in the American West through the language of the landscape centered around her home state of California. These contemplative works bring forth multiple associations and conflicting emotions regarding our environment: the often personal and tender memories of home; the comfort and beauty of the ordinary landscape; painful histories; and the anxieties of living in a world forever altered by human-caused climate change.
Anderson travels to locations throughout California in search of areas where environmental damage, human alteration, or architectural remnants of the past are noticeable. She documents these visual tensions between pain and beauty with her camera and uses the photographs as source material for her compositions. These everyday places become visual metaphors for more significant societal and environmental concerns, advocating for empathy and care that should be practiced for the land we inhabit.
Landscape as Psyche | June 19, 2025 by Charlie Smith
To describe Nicole Irene Anderson as simply a painter is to understate the force majeure she embodies in the studio. She mines the emotional terrain with an unrelenting commitment, refusing sentimentality in favor of something sharper, truer. LINK
An Emotionally Charged Reverie | June 11, 2025 by Edgar Zhang for DART Magazine
While we talk, Nicole usually goes silent, she doesn’t explain everything. In those quiet moments, her drawings drowned me like water, swallowed me in, then dominated the space, became more than just landscape, but perception, trauma, and the act of seeing in partial light like dreamcore. As Nicole put it, “I want the work to cast a spell. To move people more than explain something.” LINK
Johansson Projects: Nicole Irene Anderson, A Tangled Coexistence | January 16, 2025 by Lisa Plachy for 7×7
[…] The artist creates fantastic scenes of scenic unease in richly colorful pieces haunted by loneliness yet shimmering with the sublime. Through exacting detail, Anderson critically appraises the greed and violence of western expansion and questions of what land both offers and requires. LINK
A Beautiful Destruction | January 3, 2025 by Sarah Bass for Midbrow
Perspectives twist, distances collapse, and improbable layers appear. The eerily beautiful violence of a takeover echo throughout, the inevitable wildness of death to come. LINK
“A Tangled Coexistence” is a sharp commentary on the California dream | November 8, 2024 by Tony Bravo for San Francisco Chronicle Datebook
Anderson’s works are a sharp commentary on the California dream and the banal, everyday nightmares that come hand in hand with it. LINK