How to take the node reference field from views
What you do is set up a relationship, as the image itself isn't the node reference, rather a field in that node.  So, you go into Views and after setting it up to grab your article fields, you then set up a relationship, and there, you select that node reference field from your article type.  Then, in fields, you go and select that image field, and there, you use that relationship.  What this does is go and grab that image content type's node id from your article and then using that node id, grab the image field out of it for display.