Ramie Nunally was born in Cookeville, TN in 1980 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Tennessee Technological University in 2006. She was represented by Gallery ART a la Carte on the Historic WestSide of Cookeville. She finds writing about herself in third person to be a very uncomfortable exercise, and so has decided to switch to first.
I was six years old and it was too dark to play outside and I was bored, so my Grandfather showed me how to draw a dachshund. Yes, a dachshund specifically; dachshunds were and yet are very much a thing in my family. I made the ears too round, Grandpa carefully reshaped them into soft points. That's my earliest memory of art, but it still very much encompasses what I enjoy about it - art as a collaborative experience, something to share, a dialogue, an exchange.
Most of my paintings are executed in acrylic on a variety of hard boards with a clay surface. The oldest oil paintings in existence were painted on gessoed hardboard; canvas eventually become more popular as it made very large paintings possible, but hardboard never went away entirely. I'm glad for that, it makes my entire technique possible. No other surface allows me to puddle and pool paint in wet, washy watercolor fashion, and then add details to those dried washes of paint with the point of a craft knife. I paint in a fashion that is loose and fluid and technical to point of obsession, I alternate between those states until the completed art balances between them, hopefully beautifully so. This "Jekyll and Hyde" attitude extends all the way through my works; I paint a man and he must look exactly so and yet I have no idea who he is or what he is doing there, nor do I have any need to know, although: who do you think he is? Dialogue, exchange, tell me what you see. I love nothing better than when someone tells me how my art made them feel, because that is the essence of art to me - how you feel when you're looking at it.