Sunday Evening Art Gallery on Thursday — Nolan Preece

Nolan Preece was born in 1947 in Vernal, Utah. His parents encouraged his early interest in art, and he was helping his father in the home darkroom at age five.

A photographer for over forty years, Preece has devoted his work to understanding and mastering the challenging techniques of early photography, but also promoting new processes such as the chemogram, an experimental process he discovered in the late nineteen-seventies using cliche-verre (print on glass.). 

Preece drips chemical solvents onto glass that has been coated with smoke. To convert this glass matrix or negative into a lasting paper print, it is enlarged onto fiber based paper. This process must be completed in the darkroom.

The chemigram combines the physics of painting (varnish, wax, oil) and the chemistry of photography (photosensitive emulsion, developer, fixer); without the use of a camera, an enlarger, and in full light.

He has his own methods and applies them meticulously.

Over the past thirty years, the artist has continued to create images of surprising complexity and beauty, exploring new methods including the use of digital technology.

Preece’s work evokes a speculative, poetic feeling unlike other forms of painting.

Preece has said that the essential qualities of this experience include a sense of translucency, stilled movement, vastness within the intimate, and a quietude that contains within it a spectrum of unsettled emotions. 

Nolan Preece‘s amazing chemical art can be found at http://www.nolanpreece.com/.