Danielle Orchard’s paintings interpret the “anxiety around intimacy”

Indiana-born artist Danielle Orchard’s paintings interpret the feeling of “anxiety around intimacy, the risks inherent to truly knowing another person,” in a structured and multi-layered style. Despite developing from the notions of a fear of intimacy, Danielle’s paintings feel affectionate with their immediate expression.

After graduating with a BFA in Painting from Indiana University and an MFA from CUNY-Hunter College, Danielle went on to receive a MFA fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation and was the Alma B.C Shapiro artist in residence at the Corporation of Yaddo in 2014. Currently the artist works as a curator at Underdonk in Brooklyn, New York.

“I paint mostly women, because that is the experience I feel best equipped to discuss,” she tells It’s Nice That. “I explore these ideas by culling from western art history, and look to analytic cubism, the Italian renaissance, the Chicago imagists, the Bay Area painters — any moment when the human figure has been used to indicate an otherwise hidden psychological position.” This range of influences means that Danielle’s process is “disorganised and frenetic,” the latter can be felt in each of her paintings in a mix of brush strokes and a varying colour palette.

Danielle’s sources of inspiration also include looking to “Instagram and in museum books,” she explains. “I am most strongly drawn to points of physical pressure – two vases touching in a Morandi, Georgia O’Keefe’s hand resting on a cow skull — elliptical moments that I hope to capture and merge with the rest of characters I paint, characters who are, ultimately, proxies for myself.”