Nicole Mathers

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Nicole grew up in the eighties and nineties in a culturally rich environment.  She chose the arts early on in life and studied Fine Art at Mount Holyoke College, with a focus on printmaking and life sized figurative sculpture.  In addition to art she spent over 20 years studying classical music with an original aim of becoming an Opera singer and now an interest in how vibrations of a full body sound resonance, can heal and deepen ones inner work. 

After University she began teaching, first in inner city Public Schools and then in the Waldorf Schools where she is able to incorporate music and art into her daily lessons. 

Nicole lived and worked in France for 8 years, one year of which she studied painting in the Anthroposophical style of layering veils of pigment.  She completed a series of large pieces done with oil paints, as well as many smaller watercolors.  When she moved back to the US in 2012 she continued exploring new ways of painting: slowing down, being more methodical, more meditative in the process and allowing the picture to emerge of its own accord.  This has lead to her newest work where she is delving into line, movement and color, and discovering how these three properties can play together, find harmony and convey meaning.

Nicole has had a lifelong interest in the Fourth Way Work, and has a daily meditative practice from which she finds an inner quiet, purpose and connection. She continues to sing, loves to dance, and enjoys spending time with her children.

Nicole and her three children live in Sonoma County, California. 

Influenced by her early sculptural work as an undergraduate Fine Arts student at Mt Holyoke College, Nicole sees the world in interacting shapes and color.  This more rounded aesthetic defines her method as a painter.  Her subject matter of light traversing the colorful fields of life, captures movement, conveys feeling and invites the viewer to enter her pictures and read into the messages hidden within.

Nicole draws her inspiration from her cultivation of a spiritual life, her meditation practice and her life long striving to understand the relationships between our material world and that of the great cosmos, and higher purpose of mankind. 

Her struggles and accomplishments provide a depth of feeling, a rich background, from which she draws heavily.  The grittiness of real life has helped her push the limits in her art, going beyond the traditional norms in watercolor painting,k and challenged her to think outside the box.  This can be experienced especially in her "rivers of light" series, where veils of pigment overlap to create a sense of movement, like a river going somewhere, traversing the landscape, finding ways to see the delicate fine details and the feeling created by the bigger picture as a whole.