Painter Nora Iris Mitchell has a knack for embodying the beauty in women’s sensuality in her pieces.
Nora Iris Mitchell a native New Yorker, started to paint her GIRLS series in 2022, painting nude women in suggestive positions. However, her paintings are not just about sex, they’re about her, other young women around her, and everything we attach to sex.
“They are also about creation, as new life comes from sex,” said Mitchell. The women featured in GIRLS paintings like Milkmaid and Red Flag are sensual. She is aware that her paintings are explicit, but she doesn’t want people to see them as pornographic.
The women are painted evocatively to express the more “secular” side of sex and creation. She wants to depict “the side of this that I relate to the time period we’re in culturally,” said Mitchell. The vividly-painted beautiful women construe her vulnerable perception of lust and idealized womanhood.
Mitchell largely credits the city for granting her uninhibited creative permission. “It is also a place where sexuality seems to be everywhere,” said Mitchell. It leads her to question the meanings of that through painting.
Mitchell has always been drawing. More than that, though, she has always looked at the world from a creative and sentimental perspective. “It is important to me to make things based on this outlook,” said Nora.
Although she admires many other painters, her paintings are more inspired by writers like Leonard Cohen and Anaïs Nin. They share Mitchell’s talent for capturing passion, evident in her Wet acrylic.
Her MACHINES series is another “very important” project to Mitchell. These acrylic black-on-white paintings feature mechanical systems. In this project, she explores harmony, biology, and scale. Mitchell’s intricate yet delicate MACHINES paintings extend from a cell to an ecosystem. She has also been cutting out photos of women’s faces from magazines like Playboy and rolling them onto clear orange pill bottles, a project she calls “Bottle Girls.“
Mitchell showed her first solo exhibition, “Fluid Soft Liquid Me,” at the WHAAM! Art gallery in New York City earlier this year. She acknowledges that it feels gratifying when people admire her art, or she sells a painting, but it’s not her goal. “It is also important to me for my motive not to be necessarily being likable or sellable,” said Mitchell. Her ambitions lie more in herself as an artist than in pleasing others. “I would like to make things that surprise me in a good way,” said Mitchell. “I want to show and sell, of course, but at the deepest level, I mostly just want to grow.”
Homepage image titled: Ikea. Above image left titled: Milkmaid, right titled Earthly. All images courtesy of the artist.
