Nicole Mueller
- 56 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Nicole Mueller is an abstract painter in San Francisco who started out copying cartoons as a kid. She still credits animation for how she paints, with its bright color and exaggerated shapes. She never plans a painting in advance. Mueller begins with a wash of color across the whole canvas, then adds loose lines by hand, and paints over most of them later. Her murals for The Landing in Burlingame are nine stories tall, and she thinks of them as building-sized paintings. She co-hosts the podcast Beyond the Studio, and has lately moved from acrylics to oils.
Q: You started out copying cartoons as a kid. How did that turn into painting?
A: I would argue that was my first introduction to abstraction—animated figures and landscapes are essentially abstracted versions of reality. They might be more exaggerated, or the color more amped up, or bend the rules of physics or gravity a little bit, but that ability to push beyond realism and leave you with an emotional impression is still there. I think that elasticity and flexibility is where it overlaps with painting for me...through things like repetitious gestures, saturated or emotionally charged color, imbuing movement into a static image. Eventually I discovered painting as a medium and fell in love with the material.
But this idea that a mark can have agency or personality, that color can convey emotion, that drawing and painting can become their own form of visual language…these are all things that came from animation that shaped the way I think about painting today.
Q: You describe your paintings as innerscapes, a kind of self-portraiture that looks inward. How does that work on a canvas?
A: For me, it comes down to process: creating an environment in the studio that allows for openness, risk-taking, and allowing internal signals like intuition and impulse to guide the paintings.
It means not pre-planning but rather letting the work lead the way...learning to sit with ambiguity, discomfort, and quietude, while embracing the idea that I don't know what will happen next. This relationship between the physical and emotional, the observed and the felt, the logical or rational and the intuitive…exploring these dichotomies is central to my practice. The idea of "innerscapes" came from an essay I read and applied view of the paintings as these kind of interior emotional or psychological landscapes.
Q: You love starting with a flood of color on a blank canvas. What happens from there?
A: Color sets the tone. It gives the painting a sense of ground, light, and energy all at once, and creates something to respond to or work from...that "blank canvas" feeling at the start of every piece is actually my favorite stage of a work, where anything is possible and the potential feels limitless...that's the feeling I try and harness or hang onto throughout (which only gets harder and harder as you're met with resistance, things want to resolve, or the painting starts to develop). I'm always working the canvas all over. Practically, after I flood the canvas with a transparent wash of color, then loose gestural linework starts to enter in: big, bold, and physical, like a spontaneous and improvisational dance. They mostly get covered in later layers but start to give the piece some structure.
Q: You grew up on Don Bluth and Disney in the animation renaissance. How does that show up in your painting?
A: It's true, I'm a child of the nineties...it's where my love of drawing began and my gateway into art. Some of those films are much darker than I realized as a kid...there's drama, tragedy, suspense (of course, they were pulling from Shakespearean stories), delivered in a safer or more palatable way...not dissimilar to what art can offer us in terms of creating pathways for exploring new or challenging concepts.
But it was the process I was really enamored with...the idea of bringing static images to life, how much energy a single mark can convey, the emotional resonance of color. The Latin word "anima" where the word animation comes from literally means "soul" and I think that whether we're making paintings, sculptures, cartoons, etc...we're just trying to imbue a bit of life or soul into the work. To animate something is to bring it to life.
Q: Your Burlingame murals climb nine stories. What changes when the work gets that big?
A: It completely shifts the relationship to scale. My paintings are all about process, where the physical meets the intuitive, the movement of my body in relation to the canvas. So my interest in murals is about how to scale that up in a way that still feels authentic to my painting process. My approach is very layered—it's not at all paint-by-numbers. I'm spending hours on layers that will eventually get covered up, just for pockets of space to remain. The difference is that there is necessarily more pre-planning involved, and the length of time stretches out enormously...a mark that took two seconds to make on a canvas might take two days when working up on a boom lift. But I really do think of them as large building-sized paintings, rather than traditional murals. Can they contain the same sense of energy and spontaneity when stretched out over 100 ft.?
Q: You've got a lot going on at once, murals, gallery shows, the podcast. What's next for you?
A: The opportunities ebb and flow, so I try to keep a variety of things going to stay busy and motivated. This fall I've been invited to attend a residency at the Rothko Museum (@rothkomuseum) in Daugavpils, Latvia for their 22nd International Painting Symposium. We've also been recording some really great episodes for Beyond the Studio (@beyondthestudio) podcast, which has been interviewing artists about their career trajectories and the practical aspects of making a living since 2017. That's another primary reason I have my hand in so many pots…having a diversity of income streams helps build resiliency while sustaining a practice. Lately I've been dedicating a lot of my time in the studio to making a major material shift from acrylics into oils, which has really opened up the process and introduced an even greater fluidity to the work.
