Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery is extremely pleased to announce that Nymera Thornton has been named as the Gallery’s new featured artist and she will now be promoted by the gallery for the next 14 days in the gallery’s Artist Showcase.
Nymera is an award-winning artist based in Texas, USA. She was selected as 1 of the top twelve finalists in the gallery’s 30th Solo Art Exhibition Series. The placement in this competition qualified her artwork to be showcased in this feature.
Her Artist Showcase feature will be promoted to hundreds of major news outlets. In addition, the gallery will also be featuring and promoting her artwork in the gallery’s various social media networks for further exposure.
Below are Nymera’s Artist Biography, Artist Statement and 5 of her artworks submitted to this competition.
Nymera Thornton is a native Tejano fine artist of the Representational style, with their main oeuvre composed of oil portraiture and watercolor illustration. With over a decade of experience practicing interdisciplinary traditional and digital mediums and having earned a BFA in Illustration at Academy of Art University as a first-gen student, their background in the arts is backed by committed and diverse studies. Nymera's passions lie not just in making art, but studying art histories and using the arts to educate as well. Having served in their local arts communities by volunteering at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and working as an Art Teacher for the Non-Profit Organization Creative Action for over 2 years, teaching students social justice topics through visual art, their creative experiences are manifold and continue to evolve.
Nymera has effectively intermingled their passions for exploring and creating art. Being a culture enthusiast and self-proclaimed 'Artist-Explorer', their work serves as both a visual provenance of their travels and a social commentary on nature conservation and cultural celebration as they depict iconic landscapes and heritage sites. When they are not creating, Nymera is traveling and learning, obtaining muses from the world around; passionate to connect with people, and study the past to build a better future. For 8 months in 2023, Nymera backpacked through 20 countries with a few clothes, two pairs of shoes, some art supplies, and a camera as they explored cultures and unique landscapes firsthand. These travels among their many others serve as a muse for much of their work now as they create windows to the world in hopes of inspiring and educating others.
My oeuvre includes a diversity of interconnected subject matter including material culture, iconic landscapes and heritage sites represented through watercolor and oil mediums. My body of work is, overall, a provenance of my own exploratory experiences and a documentation of important natural or cultural sites and objects. Each piece can be paired with a photograph, diary entry or research in tandem, creating a syzygy between a documentation of what I saw, and an artistic interpretation, or how I saw it.
Stylistically I am most inspired by artist-architects of the 19th century such as Frederick Catherwood, and Romantic-representational landscape artists like Thomas Cole, who each used dramatized line work to capture intricately detailed vistas and artifacts, often pushing contours to evoke fantasy. My paintings as a result are either dreamy and idealized, or filled with vibrant details, flat color and exaggerated contours, stylizing and personalizing these key features.
Philosophically I aim to embody the ‘Citizen of Earth’ spirit, Transcendentalism, and the zeitgeist of Romanticism - an era which, through its artists, elevated exalted ethos including: a reverence of and spiritual connection towards nature, an appreciation of ancient, folk and ethnic cultures, and the championing of the individual’s unique experiences and perspectives in the world. It is through the work of explorers and artists alike from this era and onward that helped to truly invoke xenophilia and environmentalism to an otherwise unknowing modern society, thus amplifying cultural curiosity and nature conservation efforts over time. This is precisely my intention when creating. With these syncretic intellectual and spiritual ideologies in mind, the common denominator can be recognized as the biophilia hypothesis - which highlights Man’s innate affinity to Nature. As such, each solitary landscape I depict is a recognizable and tremendously culturally significant space in and of itself, celebrating this simple aspect of human nature.
Succinctly, I create documentative windows to the world, inviting viewers into intertwined natural and cultural spheres. Using my art, I spotlight peoples, places, and things that I feel are out of reach from the common eye and heart, but by contrast have deeply imprinted upon my spirit. My art is for the conscious explorer who seeks within as much as they seek out. It is necessary to restate that the images I create are not just material culture stills or landscape portraits. They are paper trails of my life - a visual diary representing some of my greatest experiences, my inveterate studies and personal philosophies. They serve as preserved memories - personal educational, emotional and aesthetic experiences that I wish to share.
Ultimately, my wish as an artist is to raise awareness to heritage sites, natural landscapes, and cultural identities which continue to be threatened by misunderstanding, malice, and indifference. My wish as a human is to, and for others to, in the spirit of Meliorism continue to learn about the world and people around us we do not yet know or appreciate so we may transform our ignorance into compassion, genuine connection, wholesome curiosity and positive action.
To learn more about Nymera and to see more of her oil and watercolor on canvas artwork, please visit her website.
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