Magic in the Everyday: NY Review of Books

Magic in the Everyday-The Art of Bea Nettles, and article by Nicole Rudick appeared on March 1 in the New York Review of Books online version.

The artist Bea Nettles was born in 1946 in Gainesville, Florida, and grew up with a love of the natural world. A drawing made when she was in grade school contains, she writes in her 1979 photobook, Flamingo in the Dark, the seeds of her mature work: “plants…an exotic bird, moonlight, water, reflections, and the Florida night air”:

As children we spent most of our summers at our lake house. My resourceful father built the house in a hundred year old orange grove on the banks of Santa Fe Lake. Here we found Indian arrowheads, tadpoles, snakes, fish of all descriptions, turtles, weeds, birds, waterbugs and water lilies. The image of a rainstorm moving towards us across the lake, the smell of the orange blossoms while I lay in the shade on cool chickweed, the feel of hot sandy roads and sandspurs under my bare feet, and all the wildflowers I can no longer name are my resources.

The book’s images were made between 1976 and 1979 using multilayered large contact negatives, including some that belonged to her father, and a light-sensitive, applied-color process called Kwik-Print. Blush pink, goldenrod, burnt orange, and cotton-candy blue predominate, as do rounded forms: saucers, faces, Nettles’s pregnant belly, tomatoes, hills, the moon. Nettles pieced the photobook together from memories, “starting with my girlhood in Florida and starting over again with my daughter Rachel’s first year.” The story is linear—Nettles’s life from childhood to motherhood; palimpsestic—with different photographs layered to make up a single image; and circular—from childhood back around to childhood. She has called Flamingo in the Dark a “visual autobiography,” a phrase that can be applied to all of her work…. Nicole Rudick