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Garry Nichols “Tasmanian Devil”
His art resides in a continuum of
symbolic representation that ranges
from the semi-abstract to the
abstract mode, retaining recognizable
imagery within his plastic
pictorial space.

 

IN REVIEWS BY MARY HRBACEK 2011-02-02
http://www.nyartbeat.com/nyablog/2011/02/garry-nichols-tasmanian-devil/

Garry Nichols has honed his epic-scale paintings and related charcoal and pastel drawings to their present level of expressive authority. His art resides in a continuum of symbolic representation that ranges from the semi-abstract to the abstract mode, retaining recognizable imagery within his plastic pictorial space.

His oeuvre relates directly to memories of the vegetation, landscape, air and light of his native Tasmania. There’s pleasure and sensateness here, a universe of dream as well as the seductive but prickly arena of nature in beautiful but stinging survival mode

Garry Nichols ''Rescue Up The Creek'' (2007) oil on linen 82 x 120 in.

In his new soaring epic paintings, Nichols postulates a world of playful scale and luxuriant dream space, filled with rich looking foliage, tiny sailing vessels and enormous erotic fruits. An ocean reflects the scarlet of a setting sun hidden by giant variegated intertwining leaves. The crimson sea seems caressed by a breeze whispering through the surface, propelling sailing ships like bugs on the water. The rich colors elicit a gently nurturing feeling of quietly ecstatic revelry. Shells, coral, and a “ship in a bottle” bring long-past child’s holidays to mind. Other works evoke a dreamtime feeling of a hot desert space where maze-like shapes seem to have an animated visual dialogue with various echoing and reverberating surrounding forms. Lines like energy waves sub-divide the shimmering atmospheric surface area.

 

Garry Nichols ''Dinner Party'' (2010) oil on canvas 48 x 48 in.

Another painting, like a summer day in the outback, brings an in-your-face walkabout discovery of strange insects, organic forms, fossils and little spiky creatures crawling through vertical parallel tunnels, while a twisting pathway punctuates layers of vertical leaf-like forms. The specificity inside the shapes makes each passage a totally absorbing fantasy joyride in itself. In a different mood, dark ships reminiscent of musical instruments move over a turbulent surface while air or water flows through them. A painting of gray-black heads, squeezed together in a claustrophobic space, hints at a state of their discomfort or punishment that invokes an impending cruel fate for its cargo. Nichols’ ancestor Sarah Nichols was taken to Tasmania under such conditions. Early in the nineteenth century, freed convict Daniel Herbert carved similar Celtic-like inspired heads on Ross Bridge in Tasmania. The bridge has become an important landmark, even a site of inspiration, to the displaced people, Nichols’ family among them, who found their way to a new life in an unfamiliar territory. Nichols finds his artistic voice from the exploration of meaningful relics, both natural and historical, that populate his Tasmanian home environment.

Some of this imagery is forbidding: plants reaching to sting, mazes inside shapes with horizontal hot waves. But the overall joyful effect of activity and wonder prevails. His exuberance cannot be contained; images migrate to wooden furniture, a sculpture stand, and to a series of folk art weather vanes that he designed. Nichols’s playful revelry of fantasy in action evokes Henri Rousseau. The luxuriant foliage and erotic natural imagery nurtures the ecstatic aspect of euphoric soaring sensation. The paintings speak of meditative impressions and personal memories captured, to be recombined in the light of the artist’s active contemporary experience.
 


Mary Hrbacek.
Mary Hrbacek has been writing about art in New York City since the late nineties. She has had more than one hundred reviews published in print in The New York Art World, and has written for NY Arts magazine. Her Commentary spans a broad spectrum of art, from the contemporary cutting-edge to the Old Masters.

She has covered exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Armory Show, the Affordable Art Fair, and two consecutive Venice Biennials. After a trip in 2002 to China, Hrbacek wrote a special essay report on the cities of Beijing, Chongching and on art in Shanghai. Hrbacek is an artist who maintains a studio in Harlem.
WEBSITE » See other writings

 

7 New York Painters
by Ben La Rocco
BRIK GALLERY, CATSKILL, NY | JUNE 18 – JULY 17, 2011


Rip Van Winkle on Main Street, Catskill, New York.

Though both are now deemed historical phenomena, there is still a Hudson River School and a New York School of painting. Both are in evidence at BRIK Gallery, Catskill, New York, in an exhibition entitled 7 New York Painters, so named for its participants’ ongoing connection to both New York City and the Hudson Valley. The painters are Peter Acheson, Claude Carone, Mark Kanter, Garry Nichols, David Paulson, Kim Sloane, and Richard Timperio. Outside the gallery, there is a formidable statue astride the yellow line on Main Street. It is of Rip Van Winkle though, being in whaling territory, I took him at a glance for Ahab. The latter acted, while the former slept, but the two are equally well ensnared in American lore and might be taken, combined, for the two-faced gnome of our collective consciousness: our ego and id. Which is which I couldn’t say, though for the sake of my argument I will assign darkness to the sleeper, light to the seeker, and let the two fight it out in what is to follow.

Carone and Timperio are seekers. Their titles, “Awake Evening” and “Glorious Morning”(Carone), “Sunscape” and “August First”(Timperio), speak of preoccupation with the light, though Timperio is, as his titles suggest, far more in the sun than Carone. “August First,” the giant of the show, is fairly ablaze in color and texture, while thin wet strokes of “Awake Evening” are cast in almost total darkness. Tasmanian Gary Nichols, geographically the odd man out in this distinctly American exhibition, also sails with Ahab.

Nichols’s saturated oranges, plentiful greens, and rounded organic presences drift steadily toward the equator and beyond, an eddy quickly circumnavigated by the paintings of Kanter, Paulson, and Sloane. These three painters are graduates of the New York Studio School, well known for its connection to the original New York School luminaries and its emphasis on a particular facet of composition known as “the picture plane.” I do not wish to imply that their paintings appear similar, only that they participate in their alma mater’s particular attention to the play of surface and illusionistic depth, and that their penumbrae lead back among the lotus eaters to Van Winkle’s realm of nod. Bob Thompson is along this path. Briefly: Kanter, though he does not fling paint like Pollock, uses calligraphic black and white marks against the white, non-negative void; Sloane continues his Herculean examination of the darkest, densest fields of early de Kooning; Paulson, darker still, studies the lines between the figure, the landscape, and oblivion (Thompson) like disappearing tracks in the sand.

Acheson’s paintings are the glue that holds the exhibition together. Smaller than their peers, they punctuate the space with intense bursts of saturated color and off-hand remarks. He does not exhibit the pictorial darkness of his peers, only the darkness of unknowing. If the others’ paintings are statements, his are questions. Along with Paulson’s untamed portraits, Acheson’s paintings point the exhibition outward rather than in. All these painters study nature to inform painting, as did their forebears in the Valley. The contemplation of light is among their signifiers.