Lives and works in New York, NY.
The landscape monotypes are based on images that inspire the artist’s landscape paintings, which she makes in her New York studio. At Manneken Press, McNichol worked from photographs and from memory, utilizing a simple monotype technique to create landscape and seascape images that have a direct, loose, and abstracted quality.
About half of the 2005 monotypes are still life images. “I’ve always been fascinated with the light that comes in the windows (of her studio in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn)”, says McNichol. “The objects that I paint are backlit by the intense light of the outdoors so that the part of the still life that is closer to me appears darker. How to paint an object that is lighter in color farther from me and darker in the area that is closer to me creates a challenging spatial puzzle.” The still life monotypes were made directly from still lifes set up in the Manneken Press studio.
McNichol is a 2005 recipient of a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York. Other awards include an Anna Hyatt Huntington Bronze Medal from the Catherine Lorillard Wolf Foundation and a grant from the Friends of the Contemporary Art Center in North Adams, Massachusetts. Also a MacDowell Fellow, McNichol has exhibited her paintings, prints and photographs in one person and group exhibitions in museums, galleries and juried shows across the United States. Her paintings hang in more than 40 private, corporate and public collections, including Reader’s Digest, McGraw Hill, Wyeth Laboratories and the U.S. Department of State. A native of Philadelphia, McNichol earned a bachelor’s degree in studio arts from Temple University and studied in Rome, Italy, with Temple’s Tyler School of Art.