Jessica Niello-White + Greta Waller: Golden Thread

Both artists feel deeply connected to the tradition and lineage of painting, and their positioning within that long history. Niello-White describes each of her paintings as “a single star in a broad shimmering constellation of art that exists on the planet.” For both Niello-White and Waller, painting is not just an activity or an occupation; it is a lifelong practice and a way of life. As such, both artists engage in a diaristic image-making that fuels their practices. Waller, with a raw immediacy as she pants from life, as Niello-White engages with a psychological reflection of her experience.

Niello-White considers her practice a cyclical act, returning, again and again, to the unknown. Her more psychological paintings orbit the mystery of perception and the absurdity of being, circling the “big M,” as she calls it, the Big Mystery. Niello-White embraces the archetype of “the fool’s” spirit of not knowing, as a way of remaining open, balancing beauty, humor and wonder in each carefully curated composition. Her works often edge on or slip fully into the surreal, moving between sincerity and irony, intimacy and distance, light and shadow. In portraits, Niello-White renders her subjects’ emotion and adornment foremost. Each work consistently carries an undertone of psychological inquiry, while embracing beauty and whimsey.

Waller is more rhizomatic, grounded in filtering through the everyday chaos of her life as an artist and a mother in different periods of her life. Her work explores this impermanence through still life, landscape, and observational realism, drawing connections between beauty, fragility, and time. Each painting hints at the precariousness of the human condition, painterly and lush, but observed with quietude and clarity. Charged with narrative, fragility, and human urgency, her paintings distill fugacious moments into images of luminous, human stillness. The works act as pieces to a collage of the artists life.

Both artists are able to extract the poetry from the ordinary. In their hands, the golden thread, as a symbol of guidance, connection, and continuity, becomes painting itself: a lifeline through chaos, a means of orientation and return, and a metaphor for living an artist’s life in both its modern and traditional forms.