Vivian Nair
Behind Closed Doors, 2025
Acrylic and oil on canvas
36 x 48 inches
Artist Statement:
The unseen and forgotten that live within everyone’s world inspire me to explore themes of the intimate, hidden moments via art. In my paintings, I use bright colors, patterns, and layering to reflect memories and their tangibility, raising questions about what we deem important in our own personal landscape. I often utilize repeated motifs of birds and flowers to express the idea of “the window,” peering into what was lost. I am interested in investigating how individual and shared experiences shape the self and resurface buried memories to revisit personal history.
I relate to Neo-Impressionism and Expressionism through how textures interact and how specific colors affect a work's mood. As someone with aphantasia, the inability to produce images in the mind, I find their ideas about the connection between spirituality and color fascinating, and I use my unnatural palette to reflect distant emotions from a childhood I can no longer remember. My body of work focuses on the concept of loss, loss of memory, relationships, and control as it pertains to growing up, and merging reality with imagination as it relates to the human mind.
Therefore, my goal as an artist is to generate a broader conversation about personal experience, collective memory, and the unknown that lives within us, questioning what we hold as secrets to ourselves and one another.
