Inside Elnora Nokes's Studio

Nokes in her Olathe studio

by Bob Bahr, Prairie Village Arts Council member

"No sketchbook is safe," Elnora Nokes says as she flips through one of her idea books. "It's just a place to scribble and experiment, and I will cut out stuff for a piece," she says, and then gets distracted for a minute as she ponders some of her ideas in the sketchbook in her hands. All around her studio, which is situated in the basement of her Olathe home--a glorious flood of natural light pouring into her workspace, somehow--are sketchbooks and papers with all manner of colors, textures, designs, and shapes. She is a mixed media artist, if one needs to be strict about it, but that label fails to capture the sense of being in her place of creation. It's part laboratory, part fine art steeped in tradition, part school art room complete with crayons and tempera paint. Nokes is, in a way, what some people call a direct artist, which just means she needs to have her hands on the materials to make her happiest. She likes to work in big blocks of time, preferably in the morning when she feels the freshest, and after three or four hours, her hands are likely to be caked with glue, paint, and acrylic medium.

"Purple Grain," by Elnora Nokes, mixed media collage, 14 x 11 in.

When we visited Nokes's studio recently, she had a piece on her easel that was in progress. She started out wanting to highlight the blue and yellow of the Ukraine flag, but once the piece featured a sunflower, it became a Kansas painting as well. Nokes had loosely attached yellow paper cut into the shape of petals. While speaking about her studio, her eyes kept falling on the piece in progress, and she interspersed her discussion about her workplace with a discussion with herself about where the sunflower piece was going to go next in its development. This presented a chance to learn more about her process.

Nokes works on birch panels that are cradled (glued to the edges of a deep, simple frame in the back), because she needs the stability of wood and because she often sands down elements that she affixes to the surface. The artist uses Elmer's glue or a matte acrylic medium to attach bits of paper to the painted surface. After sealing it with more medium on top of the paper bits, she often sands it down after it dries using either a drywall sanding sponge or sandpaper. Sometimes she will sand just one side of a collaged element to create a lost edge. Other times she purposely leaves a sharp edge to catch paint that is later applied. While Nokes has drawing skills, she opts to use photos for some elements just for speed and ease, printing them on 60 lbs drawing paper and cutting them out with scissors and/or an Xacto blade. When Nokes wants an element to be translucent, she will create it on "deli" paper--the thin paper that lines French fry baskets or sandwiches. She'll draw right on the surface and on the layered elements using a water-based pastel, markers, or crayons. Nokes says she feels like this layering of elements rings true for her in a larger sense. "Nothing is just what you see on the surface," says the artist. "Everything has layers of meaning."

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Painted and collaged pages in her notebook offer inspiration--or raw materials to be cut out and applied to a piece of artwork.

She's a bit impatient with people who talk about finding their artistic voice and otherwise overthink the creative process. "Find your voice? Just get in the studio and make stuff," Nokes says. "Your voice is going to be there. It's the experience you bring to it, and your five senses, and the collective knowledge you have--they all combine to make your voice."

A work in progress that started out as a meditation on Ukraine. Note the flower petals lightly attached at this stage, and white pastel stick drawings that serve as guides for more development of the piece.

If she sounds like a teacher, it's because she was one, teaching art at various levels (K-12th Grade) over decades. It's one reason why Nokes has tempera paint in her studio, as well as waxy crayons. "I use the crayons as a resist," she says. She uses good quality papers for the most part, but Nokes isn't concerned about how archival her materials are. "That's for people in the future to worry about," she says. "I don't consider my art to be for the ages. But good paper gets better results."

Elnora Nokes

Nokes likes to work on three or four pieces at a time, with ideas cross-pollinating among them. She also constantly plays with making visual textures on various papers, using liquid acrylic paint to dapple and color them, making or buying stencils that render patterns, carving out or buying stamps to add repeated elements to a surface, and even applying paint on plastic or wax paper and blotting it onto papers. "It feeds on itself once it gets going," Nokes says. "If it gets too precious, I'll sand it down or change it--I don't like it when a piece gets too precious."

One direction most of Nokes's work takes is celebrating the Kansas landscape. That's how a piece created with Ukraine in mind became a Kansas sunflower still life. Consider that Nokes and her husband make trips to New Mexico twice a year, and the artist takes plenty of reference photos. But there aren't too many New Mexico paintings in her studio. "The purple shadows in New Mexico draw me in, but when I get home and look at my photos, it never connects. They are missing something. I'm a Kansas artist and the things I connect with are Kansas things. I'm OK being a Kansas girl, and I'm the most pleased with the pieces that are about the Kansas landscape. We are drawn to color, and I am drawn to the yellow ochre and Naples yellow of the Kansas landscape, and the pinks in the morning sky."

"Early in March," by Elnora Nokes, mixed media collage, 14 x 11 in.

More than a dozen examples of Nokes's art are on view at the R. G. Endres Gallery in Prairie Village's municipal building in an exhibition also featuring work by Wichita artist Kevin Kelly. It's part of the ongoing series of shows organized by the Prairie Village Arts Council, and it's up until May 9. More pieces by Nokes and Kelly are on view at Meadowbrook Park's clubhouse, at the corner of Nall and Somerset, through June. 🎨