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It has been over forty years that I have been involved in painting aspects of the natural world I inhabit and it took some time before I began to understand in some measure the reasons for it. Like many artists when they begin painting there is always the pull of influences that you admire. Shedding those influences and finding a path of your own to explore for me took some time and an even longer time for the reasons behind it to surface in a conscious way. What was odd when I started painting the land, was that I was not someone who enjoys camping and I did not consider myself a tree hugger or a naturalist, yet here I was embarking on an obsessive involvement and love affair with a subject that was to embrace all my mature career as an artist.  Over time I began to realize that the roots for it all took hold when as a young boy I was to spend some of the best times of my life each summer in a rural area of Wisconsin in a town called Fall Creek. 

Fall Creek is a town hardly on the map and is even less so today because of an interstate highway that diverted people who used to stop there on their  way to somewhere else. I was there because my great aunt Ellen and her husband Sam some years before and for reasons I do not know bought some twenty four small cabins as a business for people who needed to get off the road for the night and find a peaceful place to stay. It had no pool and the rooms were not glamorous but its location of large surrounding pines, a walkable path through them to a forgotten mill nearby with a pond and a dam that used to power it remains in my memory like something out of a storybook. It was a place of solitude and wonder for a boy from the city of Chicago to spend his summers. My two months hiking, fishing, and exploring by myself were, I know, the seeds that became the honesty I believe I bring to my landscape paintings.

In future blogs I plan on talking more specifically about artists and nature and the varying paths that have been taken.

As an artist I have a tendency to walk through exhibitions like this with an agenda. How do I stack up, is there a general trend, what is being ommited, and what is the overall quality and look of the show. 

As a whole it struck me that the criteria of much of the art that I saw fell into the realm of curiosities, that is art whose primary purpose was to get noticed and whose quality seemed in many instances to be based on it's oddity. In other words creativity based on attacking are senses with bizarre and unique experiental encounters. It is as if the SHOCK OF THE NEW becomes a formula for visual success in itself.

I like art that has the ability to renew itself as an idea and an experience and that is not just an encounter of  momentary titilation. 

I received a call from Ivan Karps son Ethan two days ago letting me know that Ivan had passed away quietly at his summer home in upstate New York. As I looked back I realized that my relationship with Ivan and OK Harris Gallery had spanned four decades .

It was a relationship that started with a trip to New York from Wisconsin in the early seventies with a roll of canvases I had painted and a sense that I had created a group of works that finally were my own in terms of idea and construction. After carrying around this eight foot roll of canvases for three days, taking them into numerous galleries I ended up at OK Harris in SoHo, and it was here I was to meet Ivan Karp the legendary owner.  Ivan as I recall said roll them out let's have look which I nervously did. After taking a moment and looking he said no one in New York is doing paintings like these. He asked are these available to sell and I said I had sold one of them for the sum of three hundred dollars. It was a painting that had taken me over a month to complete, and he said I should be getting much more for the work than that.

What happened next was a call to the owners of a new gallery that was opening across the street on West Broadway. Carlo Lamagna one of the owners came over and shared Ivans view of the work and offered me a solo show on the spot. It was one of the great moments of my life coupled with an even stronger feeling that happened when I entered the gallery many months later to see my efforts and was greeted by a sell out show. As I could not afford to take my wife to the opening I called her in Wisconsin where we were living telling her what had transpired and to charge a plane ticket so we could celebrate together. It was thanks to Ivan taking the time to view the work of a thirty year old artist and giving a helping hand that my career as a painter was to begin in earnest.

Later I was to join as he refered to it the stable of artists at OK Harris itself where I have shown to this day.  It was always with a sense of pride that I was to show there and and as I recently wrote him I always thought what would Ivan think of these paintings as I embarked on putting together an exhibition. I have seen very few weak show at his gallery which remains a testament to his visual judgment and my sense of pride in being able to be a part of the gallery.  

Ivan was as has been said, could be a curmudgeon, difficult and demanding yet one of the most generous, caring and loyal persons I have known. As a friend said who used to work for Leo Castelli he is the last of the great old time dealers. I have felt fortunate to have known him, as both a dealer and a friend and I will miss his good humor and insights and love of the great pleasures of life.

William Nichols

I will be turning seventy in a few weeks and reaching this stage in my life I find myself looking back and thinking about three teachers of art who took a problem kid and gave him direction, a sense of achievement, and a professional career in art. This letter of thanks is being offered posthumously to two of those teachers Ed Fischer and James Walker. The third William Gallagher I have been able to thank personally after many years.

 Each of these men had served in World War II, had earned there degrees on the GI bill and because of there experiences in that war I believe brought a special maturity and caring to there chosen profession. Small things like having a cup of coffee with them in their office, being invited to there homes and seeing shelves of books lining there walls,  having oil paints and canvas available, or a printing press in the classroom because of there efforts and hearing them talk seriously about art served to be my bit of good fortune in life's lottery. I have had many teachers of art over the years but these were the best. I hope my years as a professor of art and my success as an artist which began through there efforts has paid back some of what they did for me. 

WILLIAM NICHOLS

Just got through reading an article in Time magazine on Charles Dickens. Perhaps because of my own work I was drawn to the criticism 

harnessed against this writer by many of the critics reviewing his work.  It was eyed with derision because it was to accessible to the general public. In short no pain no gain. Now if there is any writer that is in my estimation a better viewer of the human condition than Dickens you would have to prove it to me. As good perhaps and different, but better, no.  

I took a group of college art students to Paris many years ago and visiting the Pompidou Museum  I assigned the following problem. The Museum is on fire you have time to only get one painting out what will it be? Now this was a pretty hip bunch of students most well versed in art forum and various other organs of "Art Speak". What the major student selection was, surprised me. It was Bonnard that major conveyor of colorful confection. Why were they responding, by taking this one work out? Perhaps it had something to do to with Bonnard's sharing of the wonder of the small things around us . Decorative art, I don,t think so.

It was always interesting to me that Monet saved his best efforts for last. It is rare that someone in the later stages of life pushes the creative envelope as he did. I have seen many of the large waterlily paintings and there are usually people sitting there looking at them in quiet contemplation. Ask yourself how difficult it would be if someone asked you to paint a definition of eternal. I have always felt in art that its greatest strength lies in its ability to create content as experience. Consider what happens in the large lily paintings. Monet by leaving off both a foreground and background and leaving only a middle ground creates an endless scenario heightened by the length of the images which seems to extend beyond our peripheral vision. What we are visually left with is an image that has no begining or end, in short we remain as viewers adrift in the eternal.

For the past year I have been in the studio working on a major exhibition of my landscape paintings. I felt it was an honor to have an

opportunity such as this and strove to put together a body of work both recent and past. The show will be up at the Butler Museum of American Arts Trumbull galleries during the months of February  and March of this year. 

What I sought was  to show a group of works that mirrored in as quality a way as I could an over forty year involvement in painting nature, and the breath of experiences it can be capable of generating.

William Nichols

I have written three blogs all three of which have served up various forms of criticism. One had to do with being to long, another to much like a professor, and the third not personal enough. Looking up blog it has a definition as a sort of an online journal.

When I have kept a journal for myself which I have done off and on for many years it was for defining what made certain works of mine successful and others less so. What creates quality and meaning in art. How best could I pursue the business side of my profession. How was I feeling about my dealers, What new ideas did I have, which did I feel might work, how could I maintain motivation during the inevitable economic ups and downs. And the list of personal concerns and thoughts go on and on. 

This all means sharing the personal something which the older generation to which I belong seems alien and uncomfortable. But I enjoy the process of getting my thoughts out so I will for the moment continue to blog and share whatever thoughts might be useful to someone else who views my work and would perhaps find those thoughts insightful.