Art Practice
Artist’s Statement
‘The artist must attune himself to that which wants to reveal itself and permit the process to happen through him.’ Heidegger
In the process of moving to a smaller studio in September 2015, Nick unearthed three unfinished canvases which he decided to use as a springboard to a new series. The new paintings that followed form a break with the preceding series of Black paintings in their change of colour, harking back to the ‘Chymical Garden’ Series; also the textural elements are more integrated into the body of the work through the painting process, as opposed to simply being ‘stuck on’ to the surface, as previously.
The paintings are a direct encounter (or series of encounters) with the material, embodying the sensuousness and physicality of painting as work. Their physicality is heightened by the application of materials such as sacking, old roofing felt and moulded cardboard soaked and flattened, with PVA and either sawdust or sand mixed with acrylic and ink. Found objects are often embedded in the matrix. Still rooted in spontaneity and improvisation, they combine the elements of chance and deliberation, what in music John Cage talked about as ‘considered improvisation’. The medium is both a set of limitations and the beginning of freedom, as Motherwell commented ‘the deepest discoveries in art have to do with the artist’s materials, the liquids, grounds, instruments, brushes sticks, palette knives, whatever,’ - the canvas acts as ‘a dance floor for Divine accidents’ to use Zarathustra's words.
Working in series is important because it feels the images need time to unfold and are to do with continuity and change; they have their own pace and it is through this that the experience of the painting is given form. The work is built up of layers of paint and material; each series is a particular body of work – something complete in itself – which may take years to complete before a new series emerges.
Nick has a longstanding interest in the unconscious as the root of the creative process, and in the relationship of art and madness; and thus a resonance with early surrealism based on psychic automatism (Miro, Masson, Matta). He has researched ‘art brut’, so called by its most avid collector and champion, Jean Dubuffet, who once wrote ‘We expect art to uproot us and unhinge doors’. It is the vitality, energy and sometime rawness of this work that inspires him, the authenticity of it, and it brings to mind Motherwell’s phrase; ‘the depth and intimacy of the marriage between the artist and his medium’ and that ‘an artistic medium is the only thing in human existence that has precisely the same range of sensed feeling as people themselves do.’
Both Tachism (Wols, Micheaux, Soulages) and Abstract Expressionism (Motherwell, De Kooning, Kline) are influences for his process in their pursuit of the now, along with the energy and exuberance of COBRA (Jorn and Appel). Lanyon, Hilton and Wynter are familiars, as are Burri and Millares. Current inspirations include Gillian Ayres, Trevor Bell, Basil Beattie, Otto Zitko and the late Antoni Tapies.
