All of Dena Novak’s thick oil paintings allude to recognizable time and space moments from her domestic life. Vases filled with flowers sitting atop crooked tabletops and overhead views of her kitchen and living room are infused with a vibrant punk sensibility as they explode into abstraction and confusion. Each painting’s impasto surface is covered with bright hues of lush oil paint that reach out from her canvases like cake icing gone rogue. Clear attempts at order have been made to assemble these scenes, but the door was left open, and chaos clearly crashed the party. It’s mayhem and comforting in one blow, and creating these works brings a cathartic purpose to Novak’s larger intention of building a world more perfectly suited to herself.

In each of her works, identifiable motifs and any sense of a setting dissolve into more lyrical and nonrepresentational passages that feel strangely vulnerable. These private glimpses into the artist’s domestic life and psyche are deliberately disorienting and overwhelming; they are loaded with a historical context she hopes to obliterate, while also providing comfort to her as a neurodivergent artist who experiences the world with heightened sensations and constant negotiations relating to her thresholds.

Novak’s parallel art practice of ceramics heightens the bombastic energy and overt domesticity invoked in her paintings. Nonfunctional and deeply quirky jugs are ornamented with wildly flowing handles, painted elements, otherworldly flowers, and an intentionally raw aesthetic. Her swooning and dripping vessels feel like they’ve jumped straight out of one of her riotous rococo paintings, featuring hyper-saturated palettes neatly mixed with more earthy tones and moments of restraint. They serve as a vivid call to arms against antiquated ideas about family, home life, and conservative notions on how we should be and live our lives.

Dena Novak (b. 1968) is a neurodivergent painter, educator, and mother whose work explores identity, material excess, and feminist resistance through a deeply personal lens. Born and raised in Chicago, IL, Novak began her formal art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later received a BFA from Colorado College in 1991. She also holds a Master of Arts in Teaching and Art Education from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1997. After more than three decades of teaching and creative practice, Novak returned to academia and is pursuing her MFA at Otis College of Art and Design, to be completed in 2025.