Nos Nymphéas — The Vision
2024 is off to an exuberant start, ignited by a decision this past fall to build Nos Nymphéas, the project about which Danielle has been dreaming since her residency in France in 2014, for Chicago, in 2024. Why now? It’s time. Paintings for the project, begun in 2021, are nearly ready to hang and will be for July, when we plan to open this walk-in painting in a publicly accessible, interior space in Chicago in time for the Democratic National Convention and the summer festival season. This moment demands that we think and dream big. It’s time to bring our hearts and minds together.
Nos Nymphéas is a response to Claude Monet’s practice of tending to and painting from his garden. After World War I, to commemorate the Armistice, he gave his Nymphéas, or Waterlilies, the massive paintings installed into a curve that hang on public view, through a park in Paris, to France. In my admiration for Monet’s practice, and for the gift of the environment his work creates, is a question:
What is it you hold dear? How do you regard, tend and care for it?
This is the heart of my painting process too. It’s a question I am posing with this walk-in painting, and my sense is it holds power to lead us to Armistice in our own time.
Maquette materials: Prints of paintings by Danielle Klinenberg (2021-4), Great Lakes rocks, wood, clay, plaster, foam, metal, velvet, MDF and plexiglass. Special thanks to Cesar Luevano for his help with figures, Christopher and Hayle at Loupe printing, Bill Dougherty, Erin Craft Mazzeffi and Noah Karapanagiotidis.
Our studio is preparing to activate this public art installation that invites viewers to rest, dream, think and imagine with free admission and compelling happenings. We also plan to make Nos Nymphéas available as a venue for community-based, political and corporate organizations during its run. Learn how you or your organization can become a partner to bring Nos Nymphéas to Chicago this year.
A Maquette of Nos Nymphéas
Cordelia Belloc Lowndes, architectural designer and I have been working together to design and build Nos Nymphéas in miniature, so that I might share it at The Arts Club of Chicago’s 91st Exhibition of Visual Artist Members, which opens January 23 and runs through February 21, 2024. I’d be delighted to meet you at the gallery to view the maquette, which shows 5 feet high x 5 - 12 feet wide paintings scaled-down to 5 inches high x 5 - 12 inches wide, mounted into curved walls, as though to embrace the viewer, and places to rest the body.
2014 Residency in France—The Bonbonnerie Paintings
This series I painted in 2014, in France, is the work that inspired me to create a response to the installation of Monet’s immersive Waterlily paintings, open to the public, through a walk in a park in Paris. Alone in a small village, Danielle imagined herself a royal painter, painting to bring works to court. A few years into working with raw pigments, she incorporated Belgian cacao in each piece in the series.
