Natalie Oliver

Natalie Oliver was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1991. She received her BFA from the University of Kansas in 2013 where she studied, painting/drawing, gender studies and art history. Natalie relocated to Salt Lake City in 2016 where she received her MFA in painting at the University of Utah in 2018. She is a professor at Utah Valley University where she teaches, color theory, watermedia III,IV and oil painting I. In addition to teaching, she creates commercial art works for paint and sip studios around the country. Natalie’s studio practice strives to combine painting and dance film using contemporary methods.
Artist Statement
“Time collapses when sifting through piles of family photographs. In March of 2018 my grandmother passed away. I traveled from Utah to Kansas to help my family filter through her estate. The discoveries unearthed from her belongings crafted a story of her life in my mind, only true to me. The degradation that occurs in between the inception of an image and future viewership, creates space for interpretation and ingenuity. I aim to recreate my grandmother’s images by illustrating the information that has been lost in the “in between” moments. I transform each black and white image into colorful paintings, emphasizing the disconnect between our reality and imagination. Horses are not pink but in my mind’s eye they are. The figures become ghostly as the true narrative of the image fades from fact to fiction, leaving traces of their familial past into the perceived present.”