DIVING IN
Painting mural at Sunport Pool helped keep artist busy in past year
Editor’s note: Venue Plus continues “In Case You Didn’t Know,” a weekly feature with fun tidbits about New Mexicans and their projects.
Natalie Voelker enjoys pushing boundaries. It’s why she often thinks big. The Albuquerque-based artist has kept busy over the past year, often testing her limits within art.
One of those challenges was presented to Voelker when she was chosen to paint a mural at Sunport Pool in the Southeast Heights.
“That was a huge project,” she says. “It was 78 feet long. I painted a bunch of different people in it. There are 12 total.”
Voelker was excited to tackle a project that represented community.
“I love the pool because it’s a space for everybody,” she says. “I grew up in Wisconsin, and we would go to Lake Michigan, and every walk of life was there. I feel like public pools are just like that.”
Voelker was also able to work in the space sans people because of the pandemic.
Yet one of the challenges was getting real people to pose as the subjects.
“I did a photo shoot with some friends, and they pretended to splash each other,” she says. “One of my other friends had her motherin-law put on goggles and pretended to swim. It was really fun, and they all enjoyed the ridiculousness of it all.”
Voelker was used to spending time out in public, where she would study human movement.
Keeping herself busy during the pandemic was important.
“Harwood closed all of our studios, and I live in a very small house,” she says. “I began working on these little paintings every single day. I usually like to paint big. It was a challenge, and I was doing this in the dining room.”
Since moving back into her studio, Voelker began work on a painting of her sister.
“Back in college, I did paintings of her. She’s been a recurring theme for me,” she says. “I couldn’t see her in person, and she lives in Wisconsin. We were doing Zoom calls, and I was trying to direct a photo shoot so I can get a reference for what I want.”
Voelker says she’s looking forward to her two-month artist residency at the Helen Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos in June.
Here’s five things you didn’t know about her:
1 “I constantly find myself staring at people because I’m obsessed with the uniqueness of faces.”
2 “I secretly like country music.”
3 “I happened to be living in Berlin in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down.”
4 “Two of my all-time favorite books are ‘A Patchwork Planet’ and ‘Saint Maybe,’ both by Anne Tyler. They’re both about seemingly ordinary people that actually have rich, complex and deeply moving inner lives. I find ‘ordinary’ people fascinating, and most of my artwork is about the sublime found within the ordinary.”
5 “My portrait painting of Davetta Wilson, an Albuquerque local, was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 2019 as part of the international BP Portrait Award Exhibition. A group of students from a British High School for the Arts wrote a song in response to the painting, and I was very touched that my artwork had inspired more art in the form of music.”