Dallas artist Gail Norfleet remembers precisely when her enchantment with flowers began. She recalls the memory fondly in a 2015 video interview with Urban Art & Antiques: “Two summers ago, I rented a little house in Santa Fe—a little casita—and it had a flower garden growing all the way around it. Hollyhocks, poppies, columbine…just wonderful.” She stayed there for a month. Inspired by the natural beauty surrounding her, Gail began to paint flowers.
Oil painting after oil painting, Norfleet’s fascination with the subject grew exponentially. By the next summer, she was also drawing and photographing flowers, making photocopies of them and cutting them out. Lucite (plexiglass) panels soon became her canvas of choice as she began testing the effects of transparency, space and light. “I started combining all of the things I had been making: the drawn image with the painted image and the negative image.” This experimentation of layers led her in an artistic direction that has now become her signature style.
For Norfleet, this element of transparency was a natural progression after years of making monoprints. In her background as a printmaker, she would often use clear plastic plates through which she could see her images before transferring them onto paper. As her experiments with layering progressed, Norfleet began to utilize both sides of her Lucite
panels, pressed together to create up to four different surfaces on which she could paint, draw and collage. More recently, she has incorporated modern digital techniques to create her collage elements. However, as a classicist, she still mixes her own paint colors and draws all of her subjects from life.
In 2020, The Grace Museum added Gail Norfleet to the list of esteemed artists with work in their permanent art collection. Her piece titled Mirage was voted in for acquisition by the museum’s Collectors Circle at their annual dinner event. This beautiful mixed media piece is foundational to the evolution of many more she has created for her upcoming solo art exhibition at The Grace.
Gail Norfleet: Connecting Faraway Places will be the artist’s first chance to exhibit a new body of work created in the last few years, inspired by her recent travels to Algeria, Morocco and New Mexico. Compositions of fluidly painted architectural scenes layered with vividly colored “fields” reflect her love of nature and exotic locales. Intermingled with some of her past work, this exhibition will be presented in the museum’s main gallery beginning October 18.
The Grace Museum invites the public to come meet Gail Norfleet in person and to hear her speak about her work at a free artist reception to be held on November 14.
Contributed By The Grace Museum
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