Nicole McGuirk
On the Horizon
A college career can be a moving and tumultuous ocean. This body of work shares the years of my college studies. I choose to share my life struggles as a metaphor of storms and waves. The good and the bad are all represented in this series of works. A new day begins like a calm sunrise on the ocean: exciting and thrilling. Soon the excitement ends when the day changes and new obstacles approach, like a storm that is rough and dark. But just as fast as the storm came, the final hours of a day start to clear and the excitement you had has returned. The final hours are a beautiful sunset on a calm sea that allows you to breathe and shows that waiting out the storm was all worth the wait.
When painting, there is a level of unpredictability through the process, just like the ocean. The surface of a painting changes very quickly and unexpectedly. One of the reasons why I started painting oceans was to escape from the real world and express emotion. Throughout history, many painters have used landscapes as a way to express emotion and feeling. Romanticism artists used nature to give viewers a sublime emotion. The unknown feeling is what I like about my paintings. The sense of being engulfed by the water has a mysterious and calming sensation. The long canvas gives the allusion that you are submerged within the scene of the painting. As the day starts with the exciting sunrise and moves through a dark storm to a stunning sunset, the anticipation for what is next on the horizon is thrilling.
