Nichole Gronvold Roller says her fascination of buildings started with abandoned farmsteads.
"I would drive on country roads, looking for homes left in ruins. Peering into cracked windows I would look for artifacts that might give clues about the people who lived there, when the house was full of life," she says in her artist's statement.
Roller says she also enjoys "manipulating the rules of perspective by twisting and turning the subjects I am painting."
The results can be seen in "Structures," an exhibit featuring her slightly askew realistic paintings with their bright colors and wry sense of humor on display through April 27 at First United Methodist Church .
In "Family Portrait," Roller's family - including herself, her husband and two children - are at a table laden with chocolate cake topped with whipped cream and a cherry, while her pet bulldog swings high above a clothesline dangling with the family wardrobe.
"Galena" returns to that love of weathered buildings, a section of a 19th century relic with uneven brickwork and old wood shutters, all tilted at a precarious angle.
"Family Tea" exudes the warmth of that occasion with its cascade of finely detailed china teacups, teapots, sugar and creamers, each with its own painted scene, and a cloud of steam rising vertically from one teapot like a vapor from an Aladdin's lamp.
"Resilient" combines her love for weathered and abandoned buildings with windows to peek through, with her twisting and distorting view of them.
"I like using arbitrary colors in order to try and convey a particular mood or emotion," Roller says in her artist's statement.
"The majority of my paintings are done in my preferred medium, acrylics. Acrylic paints dry fast, giving me the ability to work on a piece without having to let an area set.
"My favorite part of painting is when I have completed a piece and I am putting on a coat of varnish, watching the colors magically come alive," she says. "I get a great satisfaction of looking up close at the brush strokes in my paintings.
"I look intently at the underlying layers, which remind me of well-worn clapboards or walls that have thick sheets of paint, that serve as postmarks of the colors the walls were in the past."
Roller is a native of the northwestern region of Minnesota and graduated from Minnesota State University at Moorhead with a bachelor of fine arts degree in education in 1997.
She lives in Peoria with her husband, two children, and that English bulldog, and she has been teaching high school art in Tremont for the past eight years.
In addition to this exhibit, her art can be viewed at the Peoria Art Guild and at the Illinois Artisans Shop in Chicago.
