Paintings to Heal Our Broken Places

I once attended the symphony on a night when the featured soloist was a famous violin player. What made him remarkable was that at no point during the performance did we ever see him play the violin. Instead, we watched the music play him, using his body as a vessel to bring itself into the world. He moved like a person possessed by a benevolent spirit, having given over every part of himself to the notes, the melody, and the tempo.

This is the way that abstract artist A'Driane Nieves paints. And she has changed my understanding of what art can do.

Tender (2018) 22" x 30"

Nieves was in her late twenties when she first set foot in an art museum—an assignment from her humanities professor to see a nearby Van Gogh exhibit. "It was eye-opening in terms of being exposed to something new, and it was fascinating, but I didn't really know what to make of it," she explains. “When it comes to more figurative and representational work, I appreciate the skill and the technicality involved, but it does not move me from any personal or emotional standpoint.” At the time, though, that was what she understood fine art to be.

A few months prior, at the recommendation of her therapist, she'd begun playing around with paints at home as a way to express her creativity and keep her hands busy. She thought little of it, though, beyond it being a hobby that grounded her. She was just "pushing paint around" as she calls it, experimenting, making things that felt good to her nervous system.

One day, after a classmate outed her as an artist to the professor who'd sent them to the museum, the professor pulled Nieves aside to ask to see some of her paintings. She reluctantly pulled them up on her phone, and her professor immediately saw something in them: "I know you don't consider yourself a visual artist," her professor told her. "I know you identify as a writer and you write incredibly well. But I do think that if you brought some intentionality to what you're doing, you have a lot of raw potential to be an incredible painter." Nieves explained that she couldn't draw, which seemed to her like a very good reason why one couldn't be an artist.

Regeneration (2020) 7'x 4'

The professor assured her that painting didn't have to be representational and reminded her of the Abstract Expressionists that they'd discussed in class. Knowing that Nieves was in school for social work on her way to becoming a therapist, the professor drew a connection between the philosophy of Abstract Expressionism and how art therapy can help people heal by allowing them to externalize emotion. She introduced Nieves to the concept of intuitive painting—a method of creating from a place that transcends conscious technique, process, and thought—something that she'd been doing at home without even realizing it.

In her retelling of that day, Nieves underscores the power of having been given an understanding of abstract and intuitive painting, as well as the language to describe them. This was especially important "as a person who is art history illiterate and as a neurodivergent person," she notes. "It took me having this completely new personal experience with making art and my professor exposing me to it as a real thing."

Untitled (2021) 80” x 70”

Following that conversation, Nieves dove headlong into educating herself about these movements and, without other visual artist friends to guide her, spent the next few years conducting a hands-on exploration of materials. She chose acrylics over oils because their drying time allowed her to work more quickly. After exhaustive testing, she discovered a preference for the viscosity of Sherwin Williams house paint over many of the more expensive paints designed for artists. Bound by nothing but her internal wisdom, her practice began to take shape around the material and the immaterial alike, connecting her to something deeply transformative about her work.

As a survivor of childhood abuse, it became clear to Nieves that painting was a way to process and move through the trauma that her body had been holding for so long. And the more she embraced her art practice as a catalyst for her own healing, the more it seemed to have a similar effect on other people. I know this, because I am one of them, and here is where our stories converge.

I need to begin by confessing that I've always struggled with Abstract Expressionist painting because I find it to be the most inscrutable of all the disciplines, farthest from my understanding. What makes one canvas worthy of a museum and another worthy of the mall? It can be hard for me to discern. As an arts writer, I can easily break down a work of abstraction into its component parts—color, composition, texture, gesture—but I have always found it to be a technical endeavor that rattles the brain and leaves the heart unstirred.

In the summer of 2020, a photograph of Nieves in her studio popped up on my Instagram feed. She was standing in front of two massive abstract expressionist canvases with evidence of the time she'd spent working on them splattered across her jeans. What drew my eye, though, was a smaller painting in the background to which I felt an overwhelming and inexplicable connection. I don't mean that I had an aesthetic attraction to it. Rather, it was as though a part of me had come to live outside my body and was now propped up against the wall of a stranger's studio next to a potted plant and a can of paint. I felt an unbearable need to be reunited with it, so I did the only thing I could think to do: I saved an image of it on my phone and stared at it ten times a day until I worked up the nerve to ask her if it was available.

I knew that the longer I waited the more likely it would be that someone else would buy it. But I couldn't bear the thought of finding out that it had already sold, that a piece of me was hanging over someone else's couch. Knowing what I know now, though, I understand that it never would've ended that way. Nieves's paintings have a way of finding the person they're meant for.

It lives in my bedroom now, the last thing I see before sleep takes me and the first thing to greet me in the morning. Spending so much time with it has given me an intimate window into the power of her work, how it changes over time, how it can speak to whichever parts of us are broken on any particular day, how something that came from one person's pain can act as a balm for another's. I can’t shake the sense that in releasing a part of herself onto the canvas, she ends up capturing something of the person who gives it a home.

The reason for this, I believe, is the artist's intention. I've seen plenty of work created from a place of trauma that remains stuck there, and it can be felt by the viewer.¹ Nieves approaches her time in the studio as one might approach a spiritual or meditative practice, acting as a channel for whatever needs to comes through her. "I just do my best to let it do what it's supposed to do," she says. "I just show up as it calls me to and I use it for my own healing. But in the process, I do believe that it alchemizes and transmutes into something that is for other people." She adds, "I'm very adamant about painting in this way because I believe there is something for Black and Brown people, especially Black people who are the descendants of enslaved Africans here in the U.S."

A’Driane Nieves

Nieves comes from a military family—she and her parents all served in the Air Force—and this call to be of service seems deeply ingrained in her. It's not enough for her to heal herself with her art when she can also cultivate a practice to help heal others. It's not enough to achieve success in her career when she can help lift up her contemporaries and those who come after her. In 2018, she founded Tessera Arts Collective, a nonprofit organization in Philadelphia, to support Black and Brown women and nonbinary abstract artists.

Historically speaking, artists of color were not afforded the same opportunity to work in abstraction as were their white (usually male) counterparts. When an artist comes from a community that has been erased or misrepresented by the dominant culture, there is often a basic human desire to offer figurative representations of one's experience in order to insist upon one's own existence. So the white art establishment has come to expect—and insist upon—familiar and easily digestible representations of Black bodies, Black identity, and Black suffering so that they can be compartmentalized for white people's comfort. Abstraction, on the other hand, is a cry of the soul that cannot be put in its place.

"I think there is something about abstract expressionism through the lens of a Black person, a Black queer person, a Black neurodivergent person, a Black woman that can shift our understanding and expectations of and around representation," says Nieves. "I think it can push us beyond this surface level desire to see ourselves reflected back to us at a surface level. I think it could really pull us forward, especially because here in the United States there is a history of emotional suppression around Blackness. We've been allowed to express ourselves in ways that have been deemed appropriate or have been validated by whiteness and the white gaze. I feel like there is still this space that has not fully been created, not fully been given—even in visual and fine art—for Black expression that is raw and unfiltered."

The Vitreous Body (Hemorrhage) (2019) 58" x 78"

There have been exciting and seismic shifts of late in Nieves's professional life. Multiple galleries are interested in working with her in this next phase of her career, which involves, in part, ensuring that her work doesn't fall prey to the speculation of the art market. She is navigating situations and opportunities that she likely couldn't have imagined seven years ago when she decided to pursue art full-time.

She is thinking ever bigger about what she wants to achieve in the world and how she can use her practice to affect change for those around her. "I remember as a child experiencing the things that I experienced and saying within myself that when I have my own children, I'm not going to do the same things. I had, from a very young age made this very resolute promise within myself that no matter what happens, I'm going to disrupt the cycles of abuse and dysfunction and toxicity," she explains. "It's not even just about my own traumas but it's about the traumas of my mother and her mother and her mother. It's generational and it's ancestral, and that definitely has been a significant undercurrent in my work."

"I've started to think of painting as a way to build new cellular memory...or at least the space for new cellular memory to be able to grow so that three generations from now someone who's related to me isn't dealing with autoimmune illness or having to experience my woundings epigenetically. Painting literally saved my life, painting came in as an intervention—that's what painting has done for me—so it makes sense to use it as a channel and as a vehicle to a different legacy for my kids and their kids."

Notes on Jupiter in Scorpio (12th House) (2018) 54” x 51”

As I was writing this, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Nieves’s mom is a pastor who hoped that her daughter would one day join the ministry. To my mind, she has. As she describes it, “At its core, my work is about…using whatever is in front of ourselves as a portal to whatever it is that we need to heal, to grow, to face hard difficult things.”² When I tell people that art is my religion, this is what I mean. It gives us an opportunity to heal ourselves and others, the past and the future, and provides us a connection to something far greater than we can comprehend.

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1. There is great value in this type of practice, it simply isn't what we're talking about today.

2. This quote is taken from Nieves’s appearance on Getting Curious With Jonathan Van Ness