George Nick
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.
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. Nicks 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's work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., among many others.
“Part of Nick’s virtuoso is his ability to make even the most banal objects interesting. A single folded white napkin nestled against a half-drunk cup of tea makes for one painting while an upside-down duckbill hat holding a medical mask makes another. Nick reveals his masterly command of paint challenging the viewer as if he’s asking, “just dare me.”
- Meg White, “New Paintings” Press Release