Introducing Nina Dolan

Nina Dolan’s paintings are like statements of belief, exuberant acts of witness to the glory of the world. Although reminiscent of things seen, they are by no means illustrative, being composed of strong colour and expressive linear forms in space. Resolutely abstract, they are pleasurable, beautiful, intriguing. They encourage the enquiring eye to make associational links with personal experience, and thus their imagery can find its way to the very heart of specific memories. Here is a reading of existence which is at once sympathetic and celebratory, intimate and general.

Despite giving an impression of shifting veils of paint, shimmering layers which appear and disappear through a permeable surface, Dolan’s paintings engage firmly with materiality - the physical presence of the paint on the canvas is as important as the formal language with which it communicates. She uses a wide range of media, including oils, acrylics and varnishes, and has invented and refined a variety of ways of applying them. Her methods of application, whether drips, squirts or pours, are just as ingenious as the individual painting requires. She is knowledgeable about techniques and the individual properties of colours and paint types. She enjoys, for instance, the effects of traditional glazes layered over her images, or the sudden juxtaposition of a metallic modern pigment with a gesso ground. She relishes the hard raised edges and thick lines she can achieve with enamel paint, which remind her of the outline effect of Japanese woodcuts.

Dolan works on canvas laid down on board, liking the absence of give of this support. She always begins with a flat, gesso-like surface, a single colour, though under this top layer other previous colours may be concealed. Dolan may paint and sand down the ground five or six times. There’s an element of ritual in this preparation of the canvas, which often involves changing the colour. Partly it is a delaying tactic - hesitating at the fear of the unknown, the journey into a new image. And partly it is a mental and spiritual preparation, a ritual cleansing as before battle.

Dolan tends to work on a painting on the flat - on a table or on the floor. Her approach is process-led: she makes her first pour, in an almost aleatory fashion, and then responds to it. In fact, her work uses chance, but mediates it through close control. Dolan is not haphazard. She researches the effects of colour and consistency, of mixing and saturation, and she can judge drying times with crucial exactitude. Her experiments into the behaviour of materials have equipped her to harness chance effects and exploit them for her own pictorial ends. She pours paint, she drips it, she tilts the stretcher: she collaborates with chance to create a new identity. A great deal of time in the studio is spent watching and waiting for ‘an optimum moment to exploit the material.’ As she says: ‘The work develops slowly, one thing unravels another.’

Days of observation are countered or balanced by days of deliberation. These are not Action paintings - they’re thought out, planned in a way which embraces the instinctual but subjects it to rigorous analysis. Dolan likes the precise, discrete nature of her marks, the fact that they don’t overlap unless she wants them to. She likes that effect of crisp separateness. ‘I don’t really want them to bleed’, she says. Her images have the authority of maps, recording the past and present, putting a shape to experience.

Dolan has to discover strategies to access the unconscious mind, to find that freedom of allusion and reference, that well of inventiveness which feeds her work. She draws a great deal, often in the ‘automatic’ state beloved of the surrealists. It is a kind of elaborate doodling which achieves intimate but unfettered contact with the subconscious. She is not drawing specific objects seen in the material world, but trying to get to grips with essence and quiddity, the soul of things. She works on large sheets of paper, drawing and drawing, spinning out imagery from deep within herself. She has portfolios of what she terms ‘fanatical’ line drawings like this. None of them are explicit preparatory studies for paintings, but all are part of the development which results in paintings.

Sometimes something on the radio, a news item or piece of music, might trigger off an image. Sometimes she says: ‘I write stories to myself’. Dolan loves stories and reads constantly: Paul Auster, Isabel Allende, Haruki Murakami. (The latter’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an especial favourite.) In the studio are pinned up drawings, newspaper cuttings, photographs, snippets of material, even sweet wrappers. All these things can enter the world of her paintings, but only in an oblique fashion, and are transformed in the process. Dolan’s paintings contain only indirect references to life, not descriptions.

Paintings which are not working are put to one side and later might be cut up and re-cycled, if passages of imagery are found to have a use elsewhere. This process of collage is a new development which will no doubt have its own effect on the evolution of her imagery. Her paintings are carefully constructed, often with a central motif, but also making fruitful use of the edges of the canvas. She works solidly in the studio - a painting doesn’t just happen. ‘A lot of it is working the space out, getting the balance’, she says.

Four of these paintings exploit a similar placing of formal elements, a shared phrasing: Stairway to Heaven, Windows of the World, After Midnight and Arizona Glow. In each of them a vertical ‘figure’ presides on the left of the painting, a totemic presence compounded of rising swirls. On the right of each is a series of six or seven steps, placed around the middle of the canvas. Windows of the World presents a facade like a tower block, or ancient rock dwellings. These window shapes, or cave mouths, appear in negative (light marks, as against dark) on the gorgeous orange vertical shape in Arizona Glow. (Dolan spent time in Arizona last year.) By contrast, in Again the Night Winds Come, the main activity takes place down the right side of the canvas, against the edge, a rippling jangle of arcs and circles, almost audible in its descent. This tangled skein of linearity is set against a subtly modulated background through which various layers of underpainting may be sensed.

All this work was made during the last two years. The other main kind of imagery features inspired drawing in liquid paint, generally confined to a central position in a field of luscious colour. There may be other incidents taking place on the canvas, but they are of lesser importance, commenting on the main event in the centre. In this group are New York Walk, Zhuan, Powamuya, Phoenix, Ecstasy, all in upright or portrait format, and Wild at Heart and Flying over the World in horizontal or landscape. There is an inescapable reference to dance in the vibrant swirling movement of these extravagant linear rhythms. It is no surprise, therefore, to discover that Powamuya is directly based on an Arizonan spirit dance of that name, and that Dolan herself trained as a dancer until she was 20. The discipline of that is evident in all her work; also the activity and moments of poise.

The half-circles that populate the upper left-hand and lower right-hand edges of Phoenix come from living in the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia. They suggest lunettes or crescent-shaped windows filled with the rich colours that punctuate desert places like oases. These cups or bowls of colour are like offerings or memories of earlier lives, previous incarnations of the painting. (Literally they are windows to earlier levels of paint on the canvas.) In their hot dry colours - browns, orange-yellows - they summon up the aridity of the desert, its heat and glow. They also suggest another kind of imagery: mirages.

A further sub-group within this body of new work might contain Free Fall, Music of the Spheres and Eclipse. In these paintings there is more going on, separate though related activities in different parts of the canvas. Free Fall is full of incident, from the foreground totem-trees, to the steep hillside behind, articulated with regularly spaced bushes like prickly pears. A cloud enters from top right and threatens to drop on what could be a leaping purple figure below. But the image should not be de-constructed in this way. It’s not there to be read as a narrative. More helpful is the kind of description JB Priestley was moved to write in his memoir of Arizona, Midnight on the Desert. ‘The early mornings, in winter, are cold, very fresh and pure. Then, under the burning noons, the red cardinals and the blue-birds flash among the cotton-woods, as if nature had turned outrageously symbolic. The afternoons are simply so much sunlight and aromatic air. But at sunset, the land throws up pink summits and saw-toothed ridges of amethyst, and there are miracles of fire in the sky.’

Besides Japanese prints, Dolan has looked with attention and understanding at other sorts of Oriental art, particularly those involving calligraphy and hieroglyphics. Likewise she has been excited by cave painting. Among the expected contemporary painters such as John Hoyland and Alexis Harding, she admires the colour of Craigie Aitchison and Anthony Fry. There are also other points of reference. For example, Vision, a large green square painting about an apparition, reminds the artist of Gauguin’s Jacob Wrestling with the Angel; especially ‘the way the canvas was divided with an image at the bottom and heavenly form at the right hand corner‘. Dolan continues: ‘Consciously, all my work is about tension and chaos or harmony’, but there is humour here too, and ambiguity. As she comments wryly: ‘you’re not sure whether you’re coming up or coming down.’ On the strength of her new work, Nina Dolan is most definitely coming up.

Andrew Lambirth
Bath & London
June-July 2006 

Biography

2003 – 2004 Bath Spa University, MA Distinction

2000 – 2003 Bath Spa University, BA – First class honours

1998 – 2000 Chelsea School of Fine Art, Foundation – Merit

1980’s Director of ‘The School of British Art’

Solo Exhibitions

2003 Robert Hall Gallery, London

2006 Beaux Arts, London

Group Exhibitions

1988 ASB Gallery, Bruton Street, London

1996 The Mall Galleries, Pall Mall, London

1997 The Orangery, Holland Park, London

1997 Leighton House Museum, London

2004 The Discerning Eye, The Mall Galleries, London

2004 Hot Spa Gallery, Bath

2004 Art Futures, Contemporary Art Society, London

2004 Summer 2004, Beaux Arts, London

2004 ART2004, Beaux Arts, London

2005 Summer show, RWA, Bristol

2005 Open summer competition prize winner, Atkinson Gallery, Somerset

2005 Paint Works, Bristol

2005 Summer 2005, Beaux Arts, London

2005 20/21 Art Fair, Beaux Arts, London

2006 London Art Fair 2006, Beaux Arts, London