(That One Picture Everyone Takes) in the Sky

Nikki Nolan was born in Southern California in 1989. She adored drawing from a young age, but only began to pursue creative endeavors after moving to her mother’s home country of Ireland at age 17, where she completed a year-long art, craft & design course and had the green light for art school. Legal red tape caused a delay and in the meantime her plans changed. She moved to New Orleans — only to put down her dream of being an artist for 10 years (aside from being assigned chalkboard duty at whatever restaurant she worked at). Finding the time and inspiration to begin again during the pandemic, she started making watercolors of what she calls “Trash Bouquets” (a familiar New Orleans sight: overgrown tropical plants stuffed into residential trash cans that accidentally end up looking like flower arrangements). She soon started making paintings on canvas, remembering things she was taught years ago, realizing some of the rules should be ignored, and teaching herself as she went. Her paintings mostly consist of acrylic on canvas, painting from photos from her everyday life in New Orleans. She is inspired by the works of David Hockney, Hilary Pecis, and Max Seckel.

Note from the artist on Other People’s Vacations

The idea for this series came to me when we were first coming out of COVID lockdown and people were starting to travel again.  At the time I was falling asleep to episodes of Bob Ross (lol) and scrolling on Instagram a lot, and upon seeing some friends’ honeymoon pictures I was struck with the idea that it would be funny to paint people’s social media posts in the style of Bob Ross. I kept fantasizing about doing a side-project that would be a departure from the large-format, super-detailed acrylic paintings on canvas I normally do, to small, uncomplicated gouache paintings on paper, and do a bunch of them. I was amused by the idea of secretly painting the casual snaps from trips people were taking, someday telling each person “Hey, I painted a picture of your vacation,” seeing how they would react, and hoping they would be okay with me sharing it (everyone ended up being charmed by the whole thing, thankfully) so I started collecting screenshots of any vacation scenes that pleased my eye. And while it was certainly fun painting those tall Italian Cypress trees with a fan brush, aside from that the work morphed into its own aesthetic that in the end didn’t look like Bob Ross paintings at all, but was a more loose, free version of my usual style, and I didn’t even stick to the gouache on paper approach in the end. After compiling about 100 pictures of other people’s vacations, I noticed a lot of recurring imagery, and the subject matter I was most drawn to and thus made it into the paintings comprised archetypical beach or pool scenes, shadow selfies, and trees, plants and flowers that evoked a sense of place. 

Since debuting the series I am sometimes presented with vacation photos from enthusiastic friends and acquaintances for me to paint. However, they have somewhat missed the point. I look at the project as existing in this other dimension, a finite window of time. When the window was open, I collected the vacations and stored them away in a little folder, privately converting a select few into paintings, and when that window closed and I revealed what I was doing there would be no further paintings. While the person posting their vacation did wind up being a collaborator in the work, they had to be unknowing until after the fact. To me, the magic was the covert but innocuous nature of it all.