William Nichols
(American, born 1942)
“As a young painter, I saw the landscape for its potential as both a conveyor of visual beauty and a messenger of meaningful experience. The difficulty was defining what was special about it for me and then finding a way of orchestrating the visual vocabulary to meet what I was seeing and feeling. The conclusions I came up with were, I think, largely intuitive and it is only over a number of years that I have come to understand more fully what those qualities were and what they mean to me.
From the beginning, I knew that I did not want to just reinvent what others had already done in landscape painting and sensed that a good deal of the intimacy (and sometimes intimidation) I felt about nature was its density and beauty close up. I thought that through the increased scale of the canvas and treating the surface almost as a watercolor, I might be able to get closer to that sensation. Also, I felt that by developing the surfaces with more gestural brush strokes, I could mirror the organic nature of the subject itself.
I would often take hundreds of photographs and visit a location numerous times to both understand it and find that special something that had the content I was after, as well as the visual architecture necessary to reflect it. One thing I thought about, for instance, was that since viewing art is often like reading a book, from left to right, did I want the viewer to be walking into the shadows or out of them? This small decision could create a change in the experience of the subject and its meaning.
When I began painting, like so many artists my age, I was interested in abstract expressionism and then other movements that were popular. It was only later that I started to paint the landscape, not a very “cutting edge” involvement in the 1970’s. It was a number of years before I understood the connection between this interest and times spent as a young boy in upper Wisconsin and the enduring memories of hiking, fishing and exploring that I did by myself.”
