Artist Caroline Zurmely’s Nail Polish Paintings Give High Jewelry a New Shine

As a child, the artist Caroline Zurmely turned nail polish bottles into dolls. “I put scrunchies on them and lined them up,” she says. “Their personalities just felt inherent. The miniature-size ones would be kindergartners. The taller bottles would be teachers—the dark green one would be the mean teacher.” She used her three-tiered bathroom cabinet as a dollhouse.

Now the 31-year-old paints with her old toys. After graduating in 2017 from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied painting—the conventional kind, with oils and acrylics—Zurmely experimented with unusual materials, such as sawdust, paper pulp, and stiffened vintage towels. They had many limitations. Take the towels: She’d apply fabric stiffener, then flick up the fibers to create tones and shadows, but this required finishing every piece in a single sitting. Zurmely had used enamel paint pens and liked the way the colors shined, leaked, and puddled. “One day, it just came to me—I should try nail polish,” she explains. She was so happy with the results that she dropped all other mediums. At home, in Michigan, she has a collection of more than 1,000 nail polish bottles, most of which are Essie, her brand of choice because it’s available at the average drugstore.

A cerulean or coral nail pigment is beautiful thanks to gross chemicals not meant to be inhaled, let alone every day for hours at a time. Zurmely paints wearing gloves and an air-powered respirator, in a studio with constant ventilation. As she works, she watches reality TV, usually Love Island, The Bachelor, or The Real Housewives. “I think I paint better when I have women screaming in the background,” she says.

The subjects of her paintings—which she’s shown virtually at Almine Rech, and at WOAW and Sens galleries in Hong Kong—are often glamorous and a little tawdry. There might be a close-up of Princess Diana’s hand, limp under her 12-carat sapphire engagement ring, or a headshot of Naomi Campbell, eyes closed, puffing on a cigarette, or a polite not-quite-crotch-shot of a rich-looking woman’s knees descending a staircase. “I’ve always loved pop culture, tabloid magazines, and gossip,” says Zurmely. “I don’t necessarily live my life in that glamorous way. It’s a fantasy, like getting to live through the paintings.”

For W’s Art Issue, Zurmely captured 10 high jewelry pieces, including a necklace from Graff, a Cartier ring, and Chopard earrings. Her process isn’t totally different from that of traditional painting: She primed her canvases with white nail polish and mixed together shades to match the gems’ colors. But unlike with regular paintings, she applied six to seven layers of topcoat to make the images glossy. “Between the topcoats, I put glitter,” she says. “It’s suspended and gives the jewelry depth.”

One of her perennial references is the fashion photographer Irving Penn, particularly his minimalist 1990s Clinique ads, which set beauty products—the top half of a brown lipstick, or a single lipliner—against plain white backdrops. Zurmely has a similarly direct approach. In high school art classes, “I used to get in trouble for my paintings not having backgrounds. I was like, ‘Why do I need one? Because you said so?’ ” In lieu of a setting, she tightly crops her compositions, focusing on something “material”—in this case, bulbous emeralds and rubellites, or dangly diamonds.

One thing Zurmely doesn’t paint: her fingernails. “I’m obsessed with nail polish, but I don’t wear it,” she says. “I bite my nails. I can stop if I want to, but I guess I don’t want to.”