theater/dance/performance
visual arts

Concurrent with her theatre work Nagrin had a prolific creative life as a painter and sculptress. Her work belongs to the school of expressionistic painters and has much in common with: Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, Jackson Pollock, Nancy Spero.

Indeed, it could be said that Nagrin’s theatre and visual art have a symbiotic relationship. Nagrin considered the paintings to be the source of her theatre, a well from which her performers could draw. The act of painting itself has featured as part of her theatre pieces. Paintings have been used as sets, or projected into the performing space. Her painterly approach is evident in her theatre’s highly visual nature and inventive stage designs. She herself describes her theatre work as, "moving-painting sculptures."

Nagrin was fifteen years old when she walked into a frame shop near the University of Washington. The shop belonged to John Utti, who was framing paintings by Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. Nagrin was curious about a strange smell that turned out to be industrial lacquer. Utti told her there was an artist named Jackson Pollock who painted using this medium.( Later on, Nagrin discovered that the Mexican painter Siqueiros had also worked with industrial lacquer, though somewhat differently from Pollock.) Nagrin began her first experiments with industrial lacquer as a very young painter.

Nagrin was in her early twenties when she moved to New York , (1952) where almost immediately, she started working seriously as a painter and was supported by a midtown gallery. She began experimenting in different mediums: industrial lacquer, oil and acrylic. The art collector Harold Kovner became a sponsor. Kovner urged her to take time to develop as an artist, advice the young Nagrin took to heart. Nagrin describes,"Entering a long, slow process of growth."

Nagrin was in her mid -thirties when she began what she considers to be her mature work . Between 1965-1980, Nagrin made her large industrial lacquer paintings.

"I worked primarily in industrial lacquer because of its luminous transparent quality which I felt was needed to express the spiritual content in the work. I both painted with it and poured it. I painted the ground of each painting, usually over some time, and then knowing the work very deeply, I poured the linear structure. It was such a singular process, so I would be tireless and focused to discover its selfness [sic]. The way I painted was choreographic, I was dancing, there was this continuous flow from the heart to hand."

This work had something of the quality of stained glass windows, the light coming through the dark. The paintings from this period were concerned with people Nagrin was deeply affected by or curious about. She felt she discovered them by painting them. Literature was also a source - Nagrin cites Goethe’s Faust and Dostovesky’s Notes from the Underground.

These works were exhibited at numerous venues across the East Cost- Dibdin Art Center in Johnon, VT. in 1973; at St Mark’s Church in the Bowery, for two months in 1976; and at the Second Floor Gallery, New York for one month in 1978. The exhibit at St Mark’s Church was of particular importance to Nagrin: "I arranged it as a walk through, a garden of burial mounds with the living presences represented there both as gravestone and icon. I was dealing now with the entire space, not simply hanging my paintings. This environment was the beginning of the next step for me, using a real space as the ‘ground’ for the work."

A significant change occurred in her paintings whilst in her early forties. As Nagrin worked, the linear structure began to crack apart and the layer beneath become more detailed. "I painted one work using industrial lacquer which was concerned with the physical being and the internal life as one. The lines had disappeared. I also painted one painting where the linear structure became all. I pushed the medium to its limits for myself." She considered herself to have come to the end of that particular painting period.

Having seemingly ended the work in industrial lacquer, she made one more painting that was both sculptural and painterly using the water based acrylic medium and the industrial lacquer. Although satisfied with this method as a potential way to move, it was not technically viable.

Nagrin made an important shift in 1979 and began to paint in watercolor and used it to source the seeds of her theatre. On tour in Japan she began her first watercolor experiments, and continued on her return to New York. She uses watercolor like gouache and the paintings have an unusual depth. A long period began that was watercolor and theatre.

Nagrin had a dream in her middle thirties that she could make theater with very little language. "I began to think of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, but live, moving in time, as Tinguely sculptures. I transformed my own studio into such a space, creating a world of painting and moving sculptural elements inside the "box". As well as making the environment I would paint when the viewers were in the room."

Nagrin was also influenced by the Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio, whose pageant paintings illustrate Venetian life during the early Renaissance. " When I discovered [Carpaccio’s] work in Venice, it inspired me to make theatre. I wanted to find away to translate into theatre what the painters of that early time of change were doing. His paintings reflect the preoccupation of the times, he was depicting extraordinary figures, the lives of Saints. My theater reveals the defining moments in an ordinary individual’s life."

Also during this painting and theatre period Nagrin began to experiment with sculptures made from clay and iron. They are highly unlikely materials to merge. "I had this dream and it was that I was to use found objects of the culture, pieces of cars, automobiles etc, I was to transform them with clay." Nagrin was told that it would be impossible to use these two mediums together as they contracted/expanded at different rates when fired. However, alchemy occurred and the two inhospitable forms merged. Nagrin states "That it was the coming together of these two ways of being- the industrial age with the ancient clay."

Alongside the sculpture Nagrin began experiments with the encaustic process. "It attracted me because of its ancient origin, the use of fire its sculptural possibilities. I find that the wax medium has the qualities that I have always favored, luminosity and transparency, allowing me to use my painterly information but extended it into sculpture."

In 2005 she had an exhibition of watercolors at the Galerie Atelier Herenplaat in Rotterdam. Up until her death Nagrin was beginning work on a new series of drawings and small encaustic paintings.

Link to 10-page interview from Contact Quarterly in PDF format.