Nora Othic: Carnival Sideshow and Other Wonders

Nora Othic refers to herself as a neo-regionalist artist, and she does share many traits common to the American Scene painters of the 1930s. Chief among these characteristics is the sincere desire to portray everyday life in the rural areas and small towns of mid-America. Her multi-figure tableaus and animal studies are rendered in pastel, watercolor, or colored pencil, employing soft but saturated colors well suited to the depiction of heartland narratives. Othic’s combination of compressed space and volumetric form yields a heroic physicality similar to the compositions found on the sculpted friezes of classical antiquity. This is apt: Debuting here is a new series, Carnival Sideshow, where her signature style transforms Greek mythological figures into county-fair headliners.