When I come across Nitski’s art on social media, what first hits me is the colour. A dozen shades of red flame off of the page, like I’d just struck a match. Blazing oranges are heightened by saffrons and pale pinks; indigos smoulder along the edges. Even the cooler pieces feel warm; roaring blues, mellowed by teals or olives. The colours on these paintings create heat. The kind of heat reminiscent of a lover’s breath on the back of the neck, or the moisture between two tightly interlocked hands. 

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Nearly a year into a global pandemic, when the spread of a deadly virus can only be prevented by distancing ourselves from others, most of us will be familiar with the feeling; a longing for physical closeness. The phenomenon is known as ‘touch-starvation’. Nitski is a sociology major who, during lockdown, has found that painting helps her cope with it. 

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The silhouettes begin to take shape after the initial dazzle eases. Ripples of acrylic suggest anatomy - knuckles on a gripping hand, cheekbones, eye sockets - and thanks to ever so slightly liquid proportions, the people in these paintings appear to be moving. One of the stillest pieces depicts two people, possibly sleeping, lying in eachothers arms, and with its upwards curves and wide waves, still gives the impression of movement; as if we can see their chests move up and down, or hear their slow, deep breaths. 

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The comments under Nitski’s videos are proof that her paintings are resonating, profoundly, with her audience. ‘I feel understood’, says one user. ‘You seriously depicted what it feels like to melt into somebody’s embrace’, says another. And my personal favourite, ‘HOW WOW LIKE THAT LOOKS EXACTLT BUT NOT EXACTLY LIKE HOW IT LOOKS LIKE BUT NOT LIKE BUT EXACTLY LIKE BUT ITS JUST COLOURS WHATTTR [sic]’. This last comment summarises (fervently) why Nitski’s paintings are so moving; they feel like touch more than they look like it. She stirs her touch-starved audience, not by portraying, in detail, where skin meets skin, but by doing precisely the opposite: by obscuring where one body ends and another begins. She flirts with varying degrees of intelligibility, some pieces being fairly representational, others demanding closer engagement. For me, the strongest are somewhere in between. In my favourite piece, two faces stand out of an otherwise mostly indistinct mass of line and shape, as if protruding from a pool of clear water which warps everything else beneath it. Sometimes the figures and their body parts on this painting can be seen and then ‘unseen’, the image becoming unmistakably clear for an instant, before descending back into the water; like the subjects are allowing their voyeur a glimpse into their moment, before withdrawing back into privacy.

When Nitski revealed on her TikTok platform that she makes paintings to cope with feeling touch-starved, her followers responded with a resounding ‘I feel like that too sometimes’. Some even shared their own personal ways of coping with being away from loved ones: sleeping with an extortionate number of pillows, or holding their faces in their own hands. Her art is a shameless statement of vulnerability. It moves its viewer to open up, partially restoring what the pandemic has damaged in us; a sense of real, unadulterated connection to one another, born out of openly suffering the same torment in a time where living in isolation convinces us we are suffering alone. 

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Glimpses of pencil are still visible underneath the swirls of colour. Quiet, stray smudges of pigment, brittle lines where the paint dried too early; these (what one might call) imperfections feel as though they belong exactly where they are. Because looking at these paintings, there’s a sense that there’s a process behind them; a real person declaring their pain. And though they make rather beautiful end products, Nitski doesn’t sell prints, or display them in a gallery. Instead, she threads them together into montages on social media, where they can be accompanied by comments from literally hundreds, sometimes thousands of people expressing that, when they look at these paintings, they feel the same ache as you do. The audience becomes an integral part of what this art is doing. 

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Here’s my contribution to the movement. The last time I touched my partner was two months, two weeks, and six days ago. Every day since, I have thought about breaking government guidelines around travel and putting the lives of countless strangers at risk in order to touch him again. Every day, catching the virus - even passing it on - seems a progressively smaller price to pay for physical contact with him. So punishing is my touch-starvation. Previously I would have been ashamed of this. Nitski’s art shows me I don’t need to be.