George Nick: 75 Years of Painting

Evening Talk & Slide Presentation with George Nick
Wednesday, July 11th, 6:30 PM at Rockport Art Association & Museu

RAA&M Members: $8.00 / Non-Members: $12.00

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(Images courtesy of Gallery NAGA – photos: Bill Kipp)

George Nick is a nationally recognized realist painter based in Boston. Blurring the line between realism and expressionism, Nick has described his painting style as intuitive and inventive. What we see between the frames is not a moment frozen in time, but a collection of moments that unify in our mind’s eye. Nick’s paintings are complicated, he is constantly running in circles, following ideas that lead to moments of clarification which, in turn, give birth to a new set of problems and intangible thoughts waiting to be chased down and painted. Nick taught painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design for twenty-five years. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Hirschhorn Museum; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., as well as many others.

The varied subjects in George Nick’s paintings – ranging from vintage automobiles to Back Bay street scenes, from Venetian waterways to Maine landscapes – reflect his appetite for experimentation. “I’m always reaching out for left-field ideas and approaches, trying to understand what I can do and what I can’t do,” says Nick. This freshness is reflected in Nick’s paint handling, which, always lively and luscious, veers from crisply detailed strokes to broad swaths of color, sometimes within the same piece.

In his 2004 essay on the painting of George Nick, John Stomberg, the Deputy Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, coined the term “existential realism” to describe the particular arena in which Nick operates. Yes, he is a realist, a painter in love with the world and its appearances, and, yes, he is, like the first generation abstract expressionists who were his peers in the 1950s, a painter whose work is a document of his moment-by-moment encounter with the art of painting.

“…George paints like a young man just discovering the appearances of things, discoveries that have nothing to do with the ego of the artist but everything to do with the world’s constant overflow of color and form.”   – John Updike