Alexandria, Virginia-based artist Charlene Nield describes her paintings as coming from a place she calls the space between, a place that exists between the seemingly ever-increasing stress of life as we live it and the high drama of the world as we know it, a place where you can still find light and whimsy, bright colors and patterns of joy. Painted layer upon layer and embedded with bits of collage, Charlene’s figurative work is a celebration of everyday moments – a woman deep in thought or sitting with her dog, or a man with a bouquet of flowers. She relies on heavy underpainting to build the history and then scratch through to bring that past to the surface or paint a background with bits of the history left open to the present. Left faceless, and at times without clarity of gender, race or ethnicity, her figures are meant to excite the imagination and spark an internal dialogue by inviting the viewer to become part of the process and paint in their mind the final strokes.
