YOU TUBE VIDEO dealing with a visit to a museum and an encounter with an artists work
Posted on 6/29/2015 4:18:08 PM
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Several months ago I was watching an ad on tv. It showed hikers in a forest on there way to a point in the forest where it reached a lookout with a view over a valley to a mountain beyond. As they hiked they bounded over a beautiful running stream and numerous trees bushes and and other interesting aspects of the land on there way to the view of that mountain. It occurred to me how much they failed to experience on the journey they were taking. They seemed to miss some very special things on the way to that lookout.
If I have attempted to do anything fresh as a landscape painter it is that experience of stopping to look at what can be just around us if we take the time to see it. Most of the images I have painted are from fairly mundane and innocent locations that are often overlooked but exist right around us. Some are off the side of a busy road or a creek that meanders through a small town. For example the painting that currently opens the website was just off the side of a small road in an inconsequential location. It was one of those moments of interesting light, and melting snow on late fall morning. The visual collision between winter, fall and extreme light created a unique moment that was very fleeting.
It is a very large painting, and this was purposeful to try to create a sense of being in, and part of that place. To enhance that experience most of the time I will push the opening of the painting that is growth at the bottom as something you have step over thus helping to make the viewer feel surrounded in the land. The amount of information included in the painting as is the case with most of my work is an attempt to involve the viewer in an exploration of that moment making it feel I hope more real.
Posted on 6/29/2015 10:26:35 AM
By William Nichols
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The problem I think most people have in understanding abstract art comes from expectations people bring with them when viewing this kind of work. Why for example and how can an artist find making paintings this way interesting and meaningful. Are there conclusions that can be defined as something we can experience from what we are looking at, and do those conclusions necessarily mean we have to like or enjoy what they are? That answer is of course not. The liking or disliking of what we are viewing is our perogative as is any experience, however our subjective viewpoint does not necessarily render the work without merit and also maybe pleasure for others.
Posted on 8/27/2013 4:20:32 PM
By William Nichols
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Winslow Homer "The Mink Pond"
I could discuss meaning in the visual arts using quite a few artists as examples, but I happened to be looking at Winslow Homer for the moment and was struck by the breadth of experiential richness his small watercolors contain. I bring this up because often people look to see relevance, purpose, and meaning in the arts through the contextual issues of the moment. It is certainly one way of ascribing importance but it can be a very transitory and misleading way of ascribing long term value.
As an example, some years ago I was taking a class I was teaching through a very fine museum when we came upon a painting by a Russian artist that had been purchased by this museum for their collection. It wasn't awful but then again it wasn't very good either. The central image and the theme of the painting had to do with Joseph Stalin and all the baggage associated with this tyrant from the past. I was surprised when many of the students had no idea of who this guy was and what he had done. Without this recognizability, the class picked the painting apart like a cold turkey defining its limitations and poor quality. The museum on the other hand, blinded by the political circumstances of the moment when they had purchased this work, assigned it credit beyond what it deserved. Content and importance in other words, can be transitory and fleeting.
When you look at the visual arts as a provider of meaning that causes us to experience and gain understanding through the power of its prose, i.e., the visual langauge, we often can discover insights that can seem to last from one generation to another and be available as well to varying cultures.
Within the the perimeter of the Homer watercolor, we are invited into a section of a small pond where beauty and danger, naivety and cunning, life and death are captured in the extraordinary complexity of Homer's brushwork, color and drawing. Two competitors vie for a meal of the unsuspecting butterfly. The story like many of those told by the artist is given its reality through the tension that he creates within the visual construction. Dark plays against light, detail crosses swords with ambiguity and the jagged edges add to the tension when seen against the rounded forms of the lilies. It is a scene that reminds us of the big issues in life that can confront us all. A small painting becomes a window through which we can view a big story and a universal theme that we take in quickly and seamlessly whether we are conciously aware of it or not. Good stuff by this artist.
Posted on 5/5/2013 9:06:01 AM
By William Nichols
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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.
Posted on 1/2/2013 9:14:39 AM
By William Nichols
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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.
