The lightness of the moment or printed painting –
Text by Carla Frese
Artist Pia E. van Nuland has, in linocuts, sought out a medium that has often tended to dwell in the shadows or on the outer peripheries of art. While many artists – the most prominent undoubtedly being Pablo Picasso und Henry Matisse – have repeatedly used this technique, it only ever figured in elements that were not the focal point of their works. Only a handful of artists have, like Pia van Nuland, created their main works using this printing technique, Karl Rössing and his student Robert Förch probably being the most noteworthy examples. And Pia van Nuland now joins them. She uses this medium exclusively and is constantly broadening its scope.
The challenges associated with this unique printing technique are often not initially apparent. First, a negative is created, and empty spaces are produced by removing the base material; the motif to be printed is chiseled out of the linoleum using a special knife. Once something has been removed, it cannot be corrected. Another unique aspect is the fact that a new piece of linoleum needs to be used for each color. Throughout art history, many linocuts have only been single-colored, usually black. Some artists work with up to three or four different colors. Pia van Nuland goes well beyond this, sometimes using as many as twelve colors in one piece. And her palette is simply endless, as oil paint enables any conceivable color to be mixed. This is precisely what makes her works so remarkably attractive. Oil paint is printed onto a finely primed canvas or handmade paper. And the large canvas prints in particular radiate an exquisite intensity of color. The dense texture of the primed canvas make the colors appear vividly compact, while the feel of the paint – applied thickly in parts – is palpable at a mere glance.
Pia van Nuland’s linocuts are not only highly color-intensive but can also be very large in size. While the early years primarily saw her focus on smaller formats, which she still continues to create using a ‘travel-size tool’, she is now increasingly venturing into large-format painting. Her largest prints to date measure 120 x 160 cm. This size alone has seen her explore her own limits and those of the linocut technique, though it also demands a certain degree of artist skill.
The motifs featured in her linocuts are based on her own observations and play with the juxtaposition of humans and the environment. Humans are often only depicted as passive and singular – the human consuming the environment in which they are sitting. They are not the focus, even though they do still constitute a significant element, as it is their presence that gives the images a particular, indeed melancholic, mood. Pia van Nuland shows us people in a natural setting – in a boat on a lake looking straight at the viewer, on a hiking path with their back to us, gazing at the reflections in the water. Humans are only ever guests in an environment that is ultimately not theirs.
Pia van Nuland illustrates the beauty and allure of nature. On the other hand, however, she also highlights humans’ misunderstanding of nature. Her singular depiction of humans in her pictures is a reference to our ambivalent relationship with nature. Nature as a place of retreat and recreation where we can feel comfortable. But nature is not nice, nor is it comfortable. If we venture too deep, we lose ourselves in it, and it can even be lethal. Pia van Nuland spent a year living in Salt Lake City, Utah, and became familiar with the mighty vastness of nature in the USA. And the force of Mother Nature can hit especially hard in a country like the USA, which is still home to deserted regions and wilderness. But her portrayals of nature are never threatening, instead uniquely conveying a sense of awe and respect for its innate strength.
Pia van Nuland has placed particular emphasis on presenting textures – whether in clouds scudding through the sky, light reflecting on the water, or the many different floral elements. She always uses new patterns and textures to break the rigidity of the printing material and add visual variety to the surface.
One piece featuring an almost overwhelming diversity of patterns is entitled Graduation Day. It shows a Polynesian boy’s high-school graduation in Salt Lake City: floral elements in the clothing; textures expressed through grass, sky and background; and vibrant clothing, gifts and accessories. While all the textures are clearly distinguished from each other, everything still appears to blur in the dense, compact nature of the piece. The resulting vibrancy of the image thus also reflects the atmosphere of the day: the joy and sense of lightness and ease felt by the family, the mother’s pride at her son’s achievement, the relief of having attained the goal, and the new beginning that will now follow.
It is these sorts of everyday observations that characterize Pia van Nuland’s works. No grandiose gestures or experiences, but rather a moment captured, its reality translated into print. The artist’s proximity to the picture, her fascination with the moment, and her desire to capture and share this mood is evident in all her works.
Through her prints, Pia van Nuland has managed to bring the linocut technique to the here and now, to 21st-century visual art. Her approach and richness of forms never cease to amaze. She has found a way of liberating linocut from its graphic reputation, instead giving it a rare painterly quality. The many different textures and colors afford the otherwise often so stark, rigid printing technique a new sense of lightness and ease. She has developed her very own style and color palette, and consequently discovered a niche that will surely be further filled.
And the forests murmured softly*
Text by Svenja Wetzenstein
Pia E. van Nuland uses her phone camera to capture moments that later serve as the basis and inspiration for her linocuts. She chooses a two-dimensional section from the three-dimensional world and sets a focus. This stage of the work process sees the first interpretation of the world.
Van Nuland perpetuates this act of reality manipulation by transferring the photos to the medium of linocuts or wood cuts in several stages.
As seemingly objective as the base materials – the photos – are as contemporary documents, the resulting image is considerably less so. It is not a printed illustration of reality.
The defined lines of the drawing in the finished print are the product of a tangle of delicate, searching pencil drawings on the block, from which van Nuland then distils, and ultimately leaves or cuts out the correct incisive line.
For the printing, every color in the image needs its own block, meaning one image is composed of up to ten different blocks whose shape and color are largely defined during the design stage. White areas of the image are the unprocessed subsurface of the image medium, which is often made from very finely woven white linen. This fineness and minimal structure of the subsurface really brings out the material nature of the oil paint. Depending on its application, it is printed in almost pastose form, creating texture as it is spread across the canvas. Viewed slightly side-on from the stretcher frame, you can make out the bumps formed by the pastose paint, generating something of a relief-like effect. In contrast to this thick application of paint are sections of subtly lustrous, virtually transparent color. These contrasts create the illusion of spatial stacking; the further the landscape elements disappear within the image space, the less tangible and palpable the pigment. The sky appears almost lucid.
The colored sections are overlaid with detailing and drawings comprised of all kinds of textures. These clear lines define the scene. Through endless variations, they generate a diverse range of surface finishes, such as those of water and stone in the Another Day in June diptych. The various textures resulting from the lines clarify the situation by precisely identifying the depicted motifs. Just as the lines provide clarification, however, they also raise questions. Closer examination of the stones, which reveal the water stains, the weave, the light and the shadow, generates ambiguity. This inanimate, hard, heavy stone is reminiscent of fish scales, perhaps even a delicate butterfly wing. Nature appears animate, living its own life, unable to be clearly defined. The water’s endless waves, eddies and light patterns reveal a small head. A swimmer who, on the one hand, is a foreign body in the vastness of nature, while, on the other, perhaps also being one with their environment. Once again, an initially straightforward-seeming situation becomes increasingly unclear, raising the question of the relationship between the person and the world around them.
The image titles, such as Father, Son and Boy Blue Lake, similarly offer few clues. They do not provide an answer to the relationship question. Is it father and son? But the ‘and’ that would designate this connection is missing. Or is the title a reflection on the fact that the father is also a son? Or does it refer to the fact that the father recognizes his own sense of being in the world in his child? The images refuse to give audiences a tangible answer. Their superficial clarity generated by the clearly set graphic elements dissolves the longer they are viewed.
The role of the human beings within their universe is a central theme. The work Inbetween Myself shows a girl sitting in the middle of a forest, silently immersed in her own thoughts, with four Primark bags arranged around her almost like a flower. Here, too, is the question of what this girl’s relationship is to her environment. What is she doing alone in the forest with her shopping? Is she just sitting there chilling out after a stressful round of shopping or has she got lost in the dark woodland? The red headphones and shoes evoke thoughts of Little Red Riding Hood. Did she set off with bags, rather than a little basket, and get led astray? Will the wolf, as a symbol of animate, dangerous nature, come along and lure her? Intermingled in the world explicable through science are mystical, fairy-tale elements that question humans’ control over their environment. Animate nature has an unpredictable, incomprehensible moment.
Pia E. van Nuland’s intensely colored prints show untouched regions, thick forest and even cityscapes where urban structures no longer leave space for nature. The role of humans here is unclear. Do they blend into their environment? Or do they subdue the world, and try to tame its elemental force by displacing it and paving it over? Or are humans themselves threatened by nature, underestimating its independent existence and savagery? Nature, similar to the romanticist concept, appears to act as a symbol of internal mental processes.
Van Nuland breaks with tradition by opting for the canvas-spanned stretcher frame. In classic printing art, linocuts are printed on paper, often protected by a frame. But her almost three-dimensional works extend more directly into space. They protrude by the same depth as the frame, creating a physicality not found in paper-based prints. This presence is increased by the fact that there is no glass separating viewers from the surface. You can actually get close to the depicted worlds to study them intensively and soak up their mood.
Pia E. van Nuland’s works raise questions. Though all her images are based on photographic studies, there is no objectivity, no single true reality. They always imply multiple levels of reality, ranging from a study of nature and an almost fairy-tale atmosphere to a graphic abstraction of the drawing. This ambiguity of form is mirrored at a content level, which offers a variety of meanings for what is portrayed.
*Joseph von Eichendorff: Mondnacht, 1835