Drawing inspiration from his extensive career in architecture and planning, Dwayne C. Nuzum's paintings tweek our sense of time and place, playing with our awareness of architectural form and function.
Born in 1936 in Boulder, Colorado, Nuzum's interest in making art began in the 2nd grade while he was recuperating from an illness. This youthful creativity carried forward into Nuzum's high school years: by then, his artistic proficiency was winning him attention, praise and even an award in a New York art show while still attending high school in Colorado. Once in college, Nuzum chose to study architecture, earning a Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Colorado, a Masters at M.I.T. and then a Doctorate at the Delft Technical University in Holland, which he attended on a Fulbright Grant. Throughout these studies, Nuzum's command of artistic media allowed him to find work on the side making architectural renderings in watercolor for various architectural offices.

Following college, Nuzum taught architecture, first at the Rhode Island School of Design, then at the University of Virginia and finally back in Boulder at the University of Colorado. He became the Dean of CU's School of Architecture and Planning in 1970, a position he held for ten years, following that role with work as a lobbyist for the university, as chancellor of the school's Colorado Springs campus, and, under Governor Roy Romer, as Executive Director of the Colorado Commission of Higher Education. That role ended with the change in administrations, bringing Dwayne Nuzum full circle. He is now teaching again, currently presenting the introductory course in Environmental Design at CU - Boulder.
In the midst of his ever-more-rigorous career moves, artistic creativity insisted its way back into Nuzum's life. In 1984, he took a long sabbatical to study adobe buildings in Santa Fe, New Mexico. While there, he began avidly working in watercolor. The artistic immersion this trip afforded his was significant, and Nuzum returns to Santa Fe several times each year to vacation and paint. Significantly, he cites painters from that region — John Nieto, Fritz Scholder, Gisella Loeffler, Benjamin Buffalo — as artists he particularly admires.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given his training in architecture and his ties to Santa Fe, Nuzum's paintings feature buildings. There are no hulking tan Rancho de Taos churches here, though. Nuzum's paintings are of bright-hued, iconically-presented structures, places that are simple homes or commercial buildings in real life, but which on canvas become explorations, full of surprises. Here, shifts in color, light to dark, are used to express perspective. By simplifying the details of the original edifice, Nuzum explores the geometric order of the place. He often portrays older buildings. These may be places constructed to the early years of the century, designed and rough-built along strictly functional lines and then embellished by their creators with architectural detailing — fancy doors and windows, gingerbread trim, all ordered from the Sears-Roebuck catalog.
Nuzum also favors places constructed with plainer — or stranger — lines, part of the “desert kitsch” that sprang up as the automobiles and inter-state highways created a new spirit of travel. Nuzum speaks of “doing away with a sense of time through color.” Not only are the buildings he captures in paint part of an American past, another time: Nuzum's use of color takes these places entirely off the clock. A sky that is solid red or yellow doesn't give us the clues we're accustomed to finding, clues that speak of soft-hued mornings or vivid sunsets or mid-day in mid-summer. We have no idea how dependent we are on such time-clues to help establish a painting's emotional context until those clues are omitted. Nuzum's vivid, unanticipated colors also shake us out of whatever complacency we brought with us concerning whatever we might have expected paintings of buildings to look like.

Text and photograph by Renna Shesso
Nuzum paintings, top to bottom:
Annie's House, SOLD
Wellington Bank, SOLD
Genoa Tower, SOLD
© Savageau Gallery 2000