Stepin Aside for the Young at Heart

Gladys Nilsson began painting watercolors, her primary medium for the last fifty years, as a student at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in the early 1960s. In her early work she played with color on paper, applying washes of rich saturated color from light to dark in large shapes and in a bi-partite or bi-laterally symmetrical composition. Her characteristic rapid scale change within the same composition has many sources, among them, aboriginal bark paintings, Renaissance altarpieces with smaller donor portraits, and representational practices in modern commercial illustration like the Sears mail order catalogue and the newspaper “funnies.”

Nilsson is fascinated by human social relations, especially between the sexes, and her observations of small actions, and trivial incidents and exchanges among individuals are her predominant subject matter. Her figures are devoid of psychological engagement and are defined rather by their spatial relations and interactions on paper, which contributes to the comical and whimsical mood so characteristic of her work. In this respect they are similar to Philip Hanson’s works (see Smart Museum 2001.635). However, the rubbery cartoonish anatomy of the figures renders them literally superficial, lacking a skeleton, much like the comic strip/cartoon character Olive Oyl created by E. G. Segar (1894‒1938). (See 1994.56.)