Nikki Ponce’s paintings – like the artist herself – are brimming with energy.
Her works are displayed in an exhibition at the Fort Madison Area Art Association gallery for the month of June.
The works give a glimpse into how her style has started and where it’s headed.
“I work blind,” Ponce said, “so I draw a blind contour, which is just an art exercise that I have my art students do. And I just really like the way the marks flow.”
Ponce is an art teacher at Carl Sandburg College in Galesburg, Ill. She said people don’t really make physical marks these days. Art is a way, she said, to make a mark that means something.
After she starts with her blind contour, she makes appropriate edits and makes sure the piece “flows.”
She uses acrylic paint on canvas.
“I really like the feel of regular canvas. I don’t like linen, I’m not fancy, but I like the way acrylic works,” she said. “You can kind of build on it. And I love oils, I teach in oils, but my true love is acrylic because it dries fast and I can move quickly. I like to move quickly.”
Her exhibition is called ‘Ephemera,’ which can be defined as something that exists or is used or enjoyed for a short time.
“Nothing lasts forever, it’s in the moment. That goes back to the mark making and the signature,” Ponce said. “If you sign something, if you write something, and you give it to someone, this mark, whatever these marks are, only exist in this moment and wherever you take them from there is where they go, but you can’t replicate them.”
Many of the paintings are of people she admires, including one of her professors, David Bowie, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Renee Bouchart,
“My kids are my cheapest models, I have five of them, so I get a lot of models. And of course, the artists that I like, and cultural,” she said. “I love skeletons, I love Day of the Dead, we celebrate that. Trying to get more ties to that as well. It’s like fleeting mark making. It only lasts now, it’s only here for the moment, but how can we make it a little more permanent.”
Ponce has always loved art, she said, and drew all the time. She also has a love for sports.
“I went to college and I played three collegiate sports when I was there,” she said. “I always got pulled back to art and I always wanted to do it, and my mom’s like ‘you need to do something that you can make a career out of.’ So the sports helped me because I got scholarships.”
The older she gets, she said, the more she sees a similarity between sports and art.
“You do all this practice. It’s all practice and then you have a big game, you have a show and people see what you’re doing,” she said. “And sports are the same way. I coach a lot. I coach junior high track and basketball and I still am very in that. It’s funny because I tell my students, there’s so many similarities between the discipline of art and the discipline of a sport or anything that you practice every day. If you’re going to get good at it, you’ve got to do it every day.”
While sports and art have always been Ponce’s favorite things in life, she said, art has always won.
“I’ve been teaching painting for the last 15 years at Carl Sandburg. The energy of the students keeps me going,” she said. “COVID was a blessing and a curse. I got to stay home, I got to work, I got to teach my kids, I got to teach my classes. But I was home. So I had a lot of time to explore and experiment. It was nice. It was a blessing and a curse.”
Ponce pointed out some of the textures in the Basquiat painting.
“When you let it be paint, that’s the (artist Robert) Rauschenberg of just letting it be. It’s hard for me, because I want to let everything like pristine, so it’s always a fun challenge,” she said. “Letting areas kind of be, I’m teaching myself to let it be.”