Nathaniel Mary Quinn tackles fragmented identity, painting portraits of people that are limited to heads and torsos yet extensive in their varied source materials, usually clippings from magazines. Born out of an unusual technique, his paintings appear fragmented. While working, Quinn obscures the entire canvas, except for the specific area he is painting. He might, for example, find an image of a nose in a magazine advertisement that he finds particularly compelling. He will then cover the rest of the composition with simple white paper, revealing only the area where the nose will appear. He paints the nose faithfully, and then removes the paper veil from the rest of the painting, reconfiguring it to reveal another area. An entirely new image will be used as inspiration for the next body part. The final composition looks like a tile mosaic or collage; it is patchy and sometimes uncanny. Due to its shifts in scale and perspective, the final work is somewhat surreal, often grotesque, but tempered by the humor of a bizarrely disjointed human, Quinn’s inventive technique, and a sublime color palette. Like Arnold’s contemplation of his own identity in the photographic grid visible in "The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold," Quinn’s characters are rendered as amalgamations, like all living people, who reflect a visual unity but are often revealed to be a complex sum of their parts.
Courtesy of the Art Collection of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, University of Chicago