About Nicole Linde

Nicole works best in her private studio when it is quiet and peaceful. She is inspired by myths, the supernatural, outer space, fantasy, and dreams. Her artwork often consists of highly saturated colors, repetitive patterns, and intricate mark making. She makes installations, paper collages, and gouache paintings. Nicole likes to create fantastical places for herself and the viewer to lose themselves inside. She hopes to engage the viewer through a sense of adventure, journey, and exploration.

A Life in the Arts: Nicole Linde

By Nye Blades

Nicole Linde is an artist living in Portland, Oregon. Her artist name is Brittle Star, which refers to the mysteries of the ocean and cosmos from which she draws inspiration. She works in drawing, paint, mixed media and Photoshop. I have been following her work for some time now, and I chose her for this project because her art appeals to me at a very personal level. Having connected to her work in this way, I wanted to learn more about the forces that shape her art — her life, creative process, and ideals to name a few.

Nicole’s drawings are complex clusters of organic and geometric form. These fantastical scenes unfold in amazing detail, one form flowing into the next. Her paintings are filled with swirling, pulsating, vibrant color. I was interested to understand her inspiration and process for these works in particular, because they are so detailed and meticulous. Her work in mixed media and Photoshop tends to appear more free form, with more atmosphere and aura rather than structured geometric form, almost like a watercolor in many cases. I was intrigued by this difference between mediums, and admired her ability to let the medium speak for itself.

Nicole began her path to a career as an artist at a very young age. Her father and grandmother were artists, so she was surrounded by art growing up. Around age six, she began receiving awards for drawing and coloring contests, a detail which she was amused to share. Nonetheless, she grew up in an environment that fostered creativity and felt no conflict choosing to begin a career in the arts. Not surprisingly, she cited her father and grandmother as the two people who exerted the most influence over her creative career.

Given the meticulous nature of her drawing, and the ethereal sensibility of her mixed media work, I was particularly curious about her creative process. From a technical approach, Nicole works best in her private studio when it is quiet and peaceful. When developing an idea, she goes to the library for visual references (figures and other visual materials) to more succinctly give her creative voice a shape. She then begins to sketch and develop composition and main elements, progressing into her creative flow from there. Possibly the most significant in her creative process is her ability to connect to the mysterious and supernatural as she is working — a junction at which she arrives by being quiet and still in her space, akin to meditational practice. Her ability to connect with a higher energy reflects on her personal philosophies regarding the spirit world and altered states of reality and consciousness. Nicole believes that every living thing is connected, and that there is an intelligence between plants, animals, and human beings that we tend to ignore in modern society. The significance in Nicole’s work, then, is an attempt to reconnect with that from which we as ‘modern society’ have distanced ourself — nature, animals, spirit, that which we cannot put our fingers on, the metaphysical and surreal.