On Painting: The Art of Janice Nowinski

I.

Janice Nowinski’s paintings are of nude models in studio setups. Sometimes, they are loose copies from Old Masters or family photos. They are small; done in a fidgeting, painterly hand.

Much of this recalls the student: copying composition from Poussin or flesh by Boucher; painting the nude to hone in on those universal problems of competence before striking out with a language of their own.

Janice Nowinski occupies this space: well-trodden, even undistinguished, and yet her work teems with originality and freshness.

II.

Nowinski tends to avoid anything superficially interesting. Subject matter, color palette, size—these are all calibrated to make room for other operations: such as gesture, touch and rhythm.

She does not take for granted those “universal problems of competence” the student pursues. Indeed, there is something doggedly pursuant in Nowinski’s art—like Giacometti, she seems baffled by mastery or pat solutions. She insists on finding more with the same tools.

A face, when she paints one, is a few lines. This simplified language is a commonplace. And yet the face she paints is particular, fresh. I find this intriguing. It is the tension between the obviousness of the solution and its utter particularity.

III.

The point in painting, I think, is to find something that cannot be taken apart without being lost. A fancy style has little to do with it—except that it can be hard to notice. Necessity is always decaying. Novelty helps. An arresting subject, for instance, or an uncommon color, can help draw us into an artwork free from the weight of generality or cliche.

Yet Janice works with the veritable ABCs. “Easel painting,” the Parisian hothouse studio atmosphere, painterly touch, an ashcan palette—these are some of painting’s most shop-worn cliches. Nothing distinguishes them. It is precisely there that Janice goes.

Take, for example, “muddiness.” By this I mean a narrow range of value, limited variation in a palette that skews brown and lacks contrast. It is often a terrible defect in students, a frequent criticism from teachers in schools; the sign of a lack of care and control.

But unlike the student who falls into muddiness, Janice Nowinski insists on it. In her hands muddiness bears fruit of a remarkable particularity. It is a kind of light, a specific light that finds life at light’s limit.

A scrape or scumble reveals a brighter shade below it. It brings a palette from petering gray brown and quinacridone magenta (nearly gone black) to peering luster. Light matters most where it is least liberally applied. Without that single scrape it would be nothing.

The same goes for brushwork. The followthrough of a line that almost falters gives the gravity of geometry to the form of a leg, but barely.

We hang on every mark, all the more because these colors and brushstrokes flirt with failure, the failure of the student, pursuant of mastery. It is precisely mastery that Nowinski risks—and that is why her work thrives where it is most unassuming. It is how she makes such a leap into brilliance from the commonplace.

IV.

Painting is a limited field, a narrow range in which certain things are possible; out of those possibilities, only one is real, and only rarely. We do not get to claim more than that.

But when we hang on every touch where we thought there was nothing, it is as if a minor miracle has taken place. What else is painting for? It is proof of miracles. They are still possible.

Janice Nowinski’s show, “New Work” opens Thursday, April 13th, and runs until May 27th, at Thomas Erben Gallery in Chelsea. You can find out more here.