Golden Labyrinth Painting

Born to Gina Peterson and Joseph Draper in American Fork, Utah, Nicolette Kaye spent her childhood years within a world of imagination alongside two sisters. As a girl, Nicolette nearly burnt the house down when she painted her first acrylic portrait. So intensely focused, she never noticed the toaster lever becoming stuck. Her mother found her blissfully oblivious painting in a kitchen thick with smoke—the toaster, the snack, and the world forgotten. Nicolette’s mother graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s degree in fine art and served as an art teacher for many years. Nicolette benefitted from Gina’s expertise across a wide gamut of mediums. Soon after the toaster incident, Nicolette was featured with honorable mention in a school district art show for a black and white ebony pencil portrait. By sixteen, the Mayor of Gilbert awarded Nicolette two tickets to anywhere Southwest flew for her winning acrylic submission in the Constitution Week Art Contest. Still in high school, Nicolette was commissioned for her first abstract acrylic work. She graduated early at age 16 and went on to study University Biology and English with visual design and painting courses sprinkled in throughout the years. As a young adult, Nicolette was commissioned for her first oil painting landscape. Around this time she leaned into a high-texture style fusing impasto with pointillism. By the age of thirty, Nicolette had bought the Belmont—a haunted hotel and former brothel in the small mining town of Superior, Arizona. Nicolette commenced restoring the historic hotel with her own two hands, and in the first phase of its revival, she opened a fine art gallery. Nicolette’s gallery remains a controversial topic on Main Street. Superior's Mayor even proposed distorted legislation to censor Nicolette’s gallery, claiming it was a "Sexually Oriented Business." Referring to phallic sculptures, the Mayor said, “Nobody ever took a painting home and derived sexual pleasure from it...” Since this time, Nicolette happily launched a nude self-portrait series to shed light on this shortsighted assumption. Soon after opening her gallery, Nicolette unexpectedly became a foster mother to the most magical infant boy. Around this time, she discovered watercolor. Always a fast learner, Nicolette experimented with watercolor on own while allowing her nude oil paintings time to set up. She is presently working through a set of watercolors for children’s phonic books.