At the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, from which Nicolette Reinsmith recently graduated, her Bay Area peers were mostly urban and moneyed, unlike Reinsmith, who describes her family as “lower middle class.” When she told fellow students stories about Humboldt County, they were baffled. They barely knew where it was. “They thought ‘redwoods’ referred to Big Sur or Oregon,” Reinsmith says. “But they were curious, so I wanted to show them through my paintings what life was like here.”
Her oil paintings show working class folks doing manual labor, like hoisting a fridge off a pickup, whose title, “Score! Free Fridge! (It Was a Piece of Shit),” is typical of her titles, irreverent and playful. “I paint the people in my community out of love and respect and shared humor,” she says. “I’m never trying to demean or make fun of anyone. I love Humboldt County and rural life. I love the dirty, grimy, ‘trashy’ aspects of it. It feels nostalgic to me, and comforting and human.”
She also has a series of paintings on the history of the county, including one depicting a man selling crabs on a Eureka street, another of two Native women drying fish and one of volunteers attempting to rescue passengers on the USS Milwaukee in 1917.
Reinsmith is interested in class and gender as they pertain to rural life. “My dad jokes that he’s ‘upper white trash,'” she says, chuckling. He grew up in the hills outside Willits, where Reinsmith’s grandfather got arrested for growing weed in a state park.
She told her parents she was going to be an artist when she was 2 years old. Later, she took drawing, painting and ceramics in school and at College of the Redwoods, where painting didn’t interest her much. “In beginner art classes you’re learning the basics, so the goal is realism. I could do it OK but I was really bored.” After her mother received an inheritance, her parents could afford to send her to art school in San Francisco. There, she says, “my painting professor saw my messy, sketchy drawings and told me to ‘paint how you draw.’ That changed my entire approach to painting and I’ve loved it ever since.”
Reinsmith’s art involves a series of steps. She starts with an image in her head or a title she wants to use. She keeps a list of titles, like “Paint Me Red Like My Cherry Moonshine,” “Peter, There’s So Much White Trash in This Fucking County,” and “Stop Him, He’s Eating My Geraniums!” (a title inspired by her mom, who was on the toilet, calling Reinsmith when she saw a deer come dangerously close to her flowerbed).
Then she takes photos to fit the image or that work with a title she has in mind. Sometimes she sees something interesting and takes a picture of it. She uses Photoshop to move images around, combine, add and delete.
Next, she creates a colored pencil rough draft, where she plans what she’s going to do. “I’ll figure out what things I’ll paint true to the photograph, what things I’ll leave out and add, and what I want implied. What is my focus and how do I make that clear through composition and color?” Colored pencil drawings are her way to see what she likes and what she doesn’t.
She applies large washes of color to the canvas and draws a sketch of the composition, then paints while listening to music that matches the energy of the painting. For example, while working on the painting “Paint Me Red Like my Cherry Moonshine,” which is a portrait of her parents’ neighbor, she says, “I listened to a lot of Southern Culture on the Skids, especially the song ‘King of the Mountain,’ because it reminds me of him.”
Although she finishes small oil paintings in about a week, the large ones can take three months or longer. She gets impatient only at the end, “when I can see the finish line and just really want it to be done.”
Reinsmith is interested in feminizing images of rural life through her art. She believes the stereotype of rural life skews masculine, but it can also be a female space. She points to a painting in progress, showing a woman dressed in pink. “Pink adds a childlike, magical element. I use color to embed myself into my paintings and say, ‘That’s me, too.'”
She sees a tension in her paintings and within herself because,she says, “I am a very feminine person, yet I’m so attracted to the dirt and rust and grime of rural masculinity. I’m trying to find the balance of those things within myself through my paintings.”
In March, Reinsmith spent a month in another rural community, historic Winchester, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where she was awarded her first residency at the Peter Bullough Foundation. Since then, she has become interested in exploring and depicting other rural communities around the country.
One of her goals is to merge her interest in painting and ceramics by creating a painting, sculpting some of the objects in the painting, and presenting them together. For her, ceramics are immersive. “Having a painting on the wall and the objects around it makes it like you’re almost there. You can immerse yourself more in that world or story.”
Holding down three jobs, two with the city of Eureka’s Recreation department and one as a caregiver, Reinsmith can’t paint as much as she’d like. So another goal is to find the time to be in the studio and paint more.
Reinsmith will show her art at Open Studios on June 6-8 and 13-14. Her paintings can also be viewed at Frankie’s NY Bagels in Eureka. Check out her artwork at instagram.com/conceptual.strawberry.
Louisa Rogers (she/her) is a writer, painter and paddleboarder who lives in Eureka and Guanajuato, Mexico.
This article appears in Glory Over Land and Sea.