Jacquelin Nagel

Jacquelin Nagel received her BA from Loyola Marymount University and is a current MFA candidate at Laguna College of Art and Design. She has been drawing and painting since childhood. She takes advantage of the relationship between drawing, painting, and photography to explore a surreal world of photo-based figurative works. She often uses a collage like approach to help piece together her own world and heavily relies on her background as a trained florist to inform her compositions. She utilizes a glazing technique used by the Old Masters to give her paintings a high level of luminosity and saturation. Her work uses the figure to convey metaphors that help her to be at peace with who she is and what she has experienced.

I create large figurative oil paintings that revolve around the concept of growth. Growth is a beautiful experience but can also bring about a whirlwind of uncomfortable feelings. I am interested in capturing this duality and exploring how these internal emotions can infringe on external environments. I want to bring into question, “What exists in reality and what exists in our subconscious?”. I aim to blur that line and combine multiple realities in a single canvas. All my paintings derive from an intuitive place and take the form of a visual subconscious diary for my life. I consider my subconscious an uncontrollable living liquid, leaking out little bits of visual information when I least expect it. I chase these intuitive images as they spiral into a strong compulsion to create. I’m on an exciting journey of figuring out what these images mean to me. Once I can understand my own work, I often realize the paintings serve as a mirror to my inner self and how I engage with the outer world. Seeing these indirect self-portraits forces me to become more self-aware, and I experience growth at its very core.  I use these emotions to feed directly back into my practice.