Nicole Shek is a versatile Oakland-based artist, live painter, photographer, and multidisciplinary creator who blends mediums and imagery to build immersive environments. Guided by intuition and tapping into flow state, her practice explores how place, memory, and energy shape the human experience. Working across painting and photography, she creates deeply layered compositions where abstract forms and surreal imagery emerge and dissolve, capturing shifts in atmosphere, movement, and emotional landscapes. Drawing from a multicultural perspective and experiences within diverse creative environments, Nicole creates work that balances the raw emotion of abstract expressionism with surrealism and visionary imagery. Rooted in her nomadic lifestyle and live painting practice, her work embodies the fleeting nature of experience, emotion, and change.

Live painting acts as a form of emotional plein air, allowing her to respond directly to sounds, physical landscapes, and the collective energy of a specific moment in time. Rather than translating scenes literally, she transforms sensory experiences into compositions through color, layered texture, and intuitive mark-making. Photography serves as both a documentary practice and a means of preserving atmosphere, connection, and moments of wonder that often resist language. Collected images become archives of memory and reference, informing paintings and mixed media works while maintaining a sensitivity to light, gesture, and the subtle emotional qualities of a place.

Deeply influenced by time spent creating within natural settings, festivals, and collaborative gatherings, her work develops through a continuous dialogue with her surroundings. Her process is inherently experimental, allowing painting, photography, and found materials to inform one another as the work evolves organically. Titles and meanings emerge only at the end, shaped by the emotional and spiritual terrain navigated throughout its creation.