Flowers for your friend with a truck
My dear friend Claire de Chivres (another artist) sent me some images and texts from a wonderful book she was reading by Tucker Nichols, an artist, and obviously a bon vivant living a cool life in Northern California.
These are two landscapes I pulled from his website which sells for $500, which I think is a wonderful price. Not too much for a lover of Painting, but an amount fair enough for an artist who obviously throws these things off pretty quickly. A Win Win, I think. If I weren't watching my pennies, I would jump on these two landscapes myself.
There is so much I like about the way this artist works that I would need a few weeks to properly absorb all the ideas that pop up out at me while looking at his work.
I don't know anything about him but I would venture to say that he definitely comes from a graphic place back in his Art education if indeed he even had one. I just love artists who break down the visual world into somewhat of a flat structure. But it's rare that I see many graphic artists who possess such a great sense of light which arrives from the 'Fine Arts'. I say it's unusual, except for the really best ones who usually sell to high end magazines and newspapers like the New Yorker and the NYT because their quality is the best.
I do have this notion that since Matisse brought Painting down to a flat surface it seems somehow, almost impossible, at least for me, to go back to a Renaissance configuration of depicting reality. This is just me though. I always still struggle with how to represent reality in a two dimensional form. Aren't we painters always looking out for a way to express a verisimilitude in a way that conforms to our own vision of the visual world?
When I go flat, I am secretly surprised and always happier. The golden-coloured clouds crossing the mountain (above) is both childishly absurd but also sophisticated smart. This is the kind of picture from an artist that reminds me of all the possibilities still left to be exploited in this unique human pastime that we call Painting. Tucker Nichols is on a ledge, one with a great view, certainly, but also one of certain uncertainty. A real artist!
I love the playful quality in these things, because God isn't the only one who knows what a nightmare we are all living at this moment. God must be a trickster to have thought up such a perfidious fool like Trump just to see how we all would react. He is a fun fellow to anoint his work with such clever titles.
I love his colours. I love the quick spontaneous feeling in all of these things and I'm envious of so much use of florescent colour. Not sure if he uses just gouache or acrylic, or perhaps both, but he appears unafraid of the challenges of using either of these mediums to carve out an original form of luminosity that mirrors the classical mode of Fine Art. But he has a remarkable sense of colour, one which matches his abbreviated sense of drawing.
I like everything about his work but it's his sense of colour that turns me green with envy. I have been wanting to make a switch over to acrylic for many of my own larger pictures so thus, seeing these things has inspired me.
His book is entitled "Flowers for things I don't know how to say". Gotta love that.
