{"id":103132,"date":"2026-05-22T07:02:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T14:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=103132"},"modified":"2026-05-21T13:21:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T20:21:10","slug":"found-meaning-in-michelle-nixons-observed-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/found-meaning-in-michelle-nixons-observed-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Found Meaning in Michelle Nixon\u2019s Observed World"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Michelle Nixon “A Parade of Umbrellas” 20×28 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the foreground of a tall, slender watercolor a luminous yellow oval on the roof of a wet-looking car identifies it as a Taxi. This spot of color is echoed by the light from four narrow windows in the somber, gray structure that lines the street behind it. In back of its black iron fence, the looming, gray building is both ornate and old, featuring a couple of two-story tall columns whose elaborate capitals are matched by the ornate stone carving carefully limned on its facade. You know at once you\u2019re not in America, where nothing so old is so imposing. The title says it\u2019s in London, a city long known for its dense fog mixed with killer coal fumes, and more recently for pouring rains. Neither of those is necessary to account for the overall brown and gray colors and velvet textures of the painting. Rather, they are part of an approach that the artist, Michelle Nixon<\/a>, employs to both maximize the impact of her medium and to make a statement about the way that life today both looks and feels to her.<\/h4>\n

The art enthusiasts who gather at David Ericson Fine Art on Gallery Stroll evening ask the artists a wide range of questions, to which they receive a similar assortment of answers. Nixon, who is currently showing alongside Rebecca Klundt<\/a>, generated a sort of call-and-response with her audience. Presumably on account of her rapidly rising reputation as a watercolorist, she was asked a number of technical questions, such as how she is able to achieve the convincing optical effects that fill the space in her scenes … no doubt beginning with that space itself. Her responses were helpful, yet at the same time often sounded less like studio talk and more like philosophy. For example, anyone familiar with watercolor painting will know the difference between the long working time sought by Leonardo da Vinci, which brought him to essentially invent oil painting, and the rapid and instantaneous work required of watercolor. But when someone asked Nixon a question relating to the latter, her response evoked something more prophetic: \u201cYou have the time it takes for the paint to dry,\u201d she concluded. It sounded like a matter of fate, or a wise comment on life and how to live it.<\/h4>\n
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Michelle Nixon “Space for Both, Somehow,” 15×11 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

Nor is this an accident. Nixon has ventured so far as to state that \u201cWatercolor is more of a life philosophy than an art form,\u201d and during her opening at Ericson\u2019s, she actually took a moment to correct the notion that her art studies, which began when she was very young, have completely preoccupied her life since. In fact, she explained, in what might have been taken for a moment\u2019s hesitation about her vocation, while at BYU she had minored in Sociology. No doubt many creative types who consider such a diversion, if that\u2019s what it is, may be thinking about the task of earning a living. But it\u2019s hard to see how anyone could think knowledge or expertise might be any more highly valued or better rewarded than art-making in today\u2019s world.<\/h4>\n

In fact, philosophy is often cited as the closest cognitive cousin to the arts, which are rightly thought to be intuitive. And if we think of those two as places on the arc of a behavioral pendulum, it may be that what today\u2019s world needs from the arts is less feeling and more fact, which might explain why so much recent art is full of data and information, whether about the artist\u2019s own identity, the dire state of the planet, or ethical responsibility. And in fact, Nixon routinely stresses the sourcing of her art in real life, as she lives and witnesses it. It might be hard for some viewers to see watercolor as among the closest approaches to reality, but Nixon, who chose it largely for this quality, insists on it.<\/h4>\n

Viewers of Nixon\u2019s unique viewpoint will have to decide for themselves if this is true, but one way of describing her work would be to say that beneath a heavy sky or behind an atmospheric haze, conditions that soften the rough edges of things but do not hide what is real from our view, she offers a convincing reproduction of what the mundane world shows us: a remarkably solid and durable world to be found in her seemingly photographic image of it. Whether the Cache Valley landscape in \u201cBeneath a Day\u201d or her cityscapes, some of Salt Lake and others that she painted during a residency in New York City with the Center for Latter-day Saints Arts, these are most definitely not flights of fantasy, but rather the evidence, as the title of another landscape has it, of \u201cPassing for Longer Than a Breath.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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Michelle Nixon “A Perspective of London” 28.5×8 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

Many cultures have a word for the appearance the world supposedly presents to confuse those seeking some ultimate reality. Sometimes called Maya in the East, while in the West it\u2019s often the Veil of Illusion, followers of this ancient, pre-scientific view might welcome the modern alternative, a vision that restores the primacy of a world we perceive and deduce through our own senses. Sadly, much of humanity still dwells in the futile practice of essentially rolling the dice and counting on luck for an explanation of why a few are so much better off than the rest of us. But those who have seen the results of paying attention to that supposedly illusory world and learning what it can teach us about our existence are more likely to say that reality isn\u2019t hidden behind the material world to which artists also pay so much attention. Rather, it is in and of the material world. At this point, a student of the physical might rap a knuckle on the wall and say, \u201cYou can\u2019t just walk through this, no matter how spiritual you feel.”<\/h4>\n

So it is that when Nixon paints \u201cA Conversation Between Towers and Hot Dogs,\u201d an urban crowd scene, or \u201cA Light in the City,\u201d in which a stoplight seems to take on greater powers than just directing traffic, she expresses her acceptance of life as it is lived, rather than wishing for something grander. Two paintings prove particularly moving, and one hopes prophetic. \u201cWhat the Trees Remember\u201d shows, on the near side of a country road, the ancient trees that have been there since before the ruins on the other side of the road were part of a thriving culture. And then, in \u201cSpace for Both, Somehow,\u201d we see a vision, realized somewhere and seen by the artist, of what looks to be a city street, divided down the middle, with people working on the one side, and lush greenery growing on the other.<\/h4>\n

Philosophically speaking, these watercolors wear their hearts on their sleeves, along with their pale colors. After all, if there\u2019s one thing a viewer given to contemplation might wish for today, it\u2019s some certainty in a world that seemingly wants to reject the notion that there even is such a thing as truth, or knowledge, or any opportunity for any but the materially wealthy. Proof of this comes in this form: the beauty and power in these paintings that immediately grabs the viewer and sticks in memory after seeing them even briefly directly attests to the virtue of starting out by seeing the world as it really is. Michelle Nixon doesn\u2019t lecture, let alone hector her viewers. She gives us beautiful visions of a world healed, or in the process of healing, or even not in need of healing, and subtle hints about how close that world is to us here, today.<\/h4>\n
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Michelle Nixon “A Conversation Between Towers and Hotdogs,” 20×28 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

Rebecca Klundt and Michelle Nixon<\/em>, David Ericson Fine Art<\/a>, Salt Lake City, through June 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the foreground of a tall, slender watercolor a luminous yellow oval on the roof of a wet-looking car identifies it as a Taxi. This spot of color is echoed by the light from four narrow windows in the somber, gray structure that lines the street behind it. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[1055,4624],"class_list":["post-103132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-david-ericson-fine-art","tag-michelle-nixon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-30 03:41:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/847"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103137,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103132\/revisions\/103137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}