Nicole Huggins

Nicole Huggins immigrated to the U.S. from Romania as a child. While waiting for entry to the U.S., she lived and traveled throughout Italy, where she developed a passion for art. She grew up on the East Coast and turned to drawing as an outlet for her teenage angst. While she was accepted to art school and considered painting as a vocation, her mother persuaded her to first study liberal arts to ensure her success in their adoptive country. She ended up majoring in political science, economics and philosophy. Her majors led her to a fulltime career in law, with a concentration in civil rights. She continued to study art and painted throughout her life. Upon retiring from the practice of law, she decided to dedicate herself to artistic expression. While Nicole has worked in many types of media, including pencil, oil and acrylics, she decided to focus on soft pastels because of the vibrancy of their pigment. Nicole has been living in Evergreen, Colorado with her husband since 1992 and raised a family here. She is pleased to be a member of the community of artists of the Mountain West. 

Throughout her work, Nicole is drawn to the beauty of nature and our fleeting role in it. In her landscapes and other pieces, she uses perspective, color, and light, to invite the viewer to contemplate nature and their relationship to it. Being surrounded by nature in Evergreen, it is not surprising that she gravitated toward landscape painting. Nicole has traveled extensively abroad and draws upon her travels for inspiration. She spent countless hours in museums and was inspired by European Impressionist painters as well as American landscape artists. Wherever she goes, she is drawn to nature as something ever changing, yet eternal. It puts our mortality in perspective, quite literally.

Nicole appreciates artwork in different styles and feels that art is like music. You can enjoy many different types of good music and what is good is a personal experience and relationship you have with that piece of art. Ideally artistic expression has something to say. The form is not as important as the thought or feeling it evokes in the viewer. Some people find a certain European sensibility in Nicole’s work. She probably would not approach art the same way without the insight that the Impressionists brought to the portrayal of light. Though in the end, art is part of life and the biggest influence in her life is her family. Nicole’s mother made her believe you can become anything you have the talent, passion and dedication to become, sooner or later.