The prints of Debra Nicholas, although eclectic in subject matter, share a common style and theme that plays with the line between naturalistic and abstract art.  Whether the print is a still-life, a domestic interior, a landscape, or one of her fantasy museum rooms full of paintings and furniture, the result is a complex, sophisticated composition in which recognizable objects are painted abstractly in bold, vibrant colors and patterns whose interplay creates tremendous visual excitement.  Debra’s early training as a designer of couture fabrics for Dior, Lagerfeld and others prepared her well for her present focus. 

As a child of artists, Debra spent much of her childhood in museums. She grew to love the museum environment so much that she incorporates it into her compositions. Debra juxtaposes icons of western art such as Renaissance paintings, Matisse cutouts or Classical Greek sculptures with high-style furniture to create a rather abstract “all art” environment that is cool, humorous and highly intellectual. She is fascinated by art as style and fashion, to the extent that in her world there is no real separation between them—the patterns in a well-known painting and in a fabric covering a chair are equally interesting.  In the “all-art” environment of her fantasy rooms, a postage stamp adorns a wall like a Leonardo painting.  It is the interplay of complex patterns and colors, whether in the tapestry of a chair, the stripes of a beach chaise, or the mosaic effects of her own style of pointillism that is at the core of this art.

Debra’s extensive collection of art history books, exhibition catalogs, magazines from the ’30s and ’40s, interior design books, images from the picture file of the New York Public Library and her own photography all serve as sources of inspiration.  She often sketches individual elements as preparatory drawings, follows these with color studies of the overall composition, and finally, transfers her ideas on to paper prepared with a tinted ground.  Once she has the individual elements ordered so that the relationship of the objects to each other is as she wishes, she begins the painting process in gouache, working brightly and opaquely in some areas and with translucent scumbles in others.   The final effect is Matisse-like in its bold celebration of pattern and line rhythm, but with a lighthearted humor that is uniquely her own.

Her giclee prints are created with pigmented archival inks that are stable for 80-100 years and printed on arches watercolor paper. She works on the color in these prints extensively, so that they match the tones and spatial relationships of the original gouache paintings.