"My paintings are landscapes of symbols collected from direct observations of nature, and from specific memories of my childhood in Tasmania. I employ cherished retreived objects from this landscape, its temperate rain forest (which is a rare thing on our planet), its scattered animal bones, ancient paths and intense dry heat. I have developed a symbology of color - ochres, reds, greens, yellows. This symbology forms the structure for the work, combined with pattern,
rhythm and repetition. I have transformed this remembered landscape into a personal landscape. Weaving through this landscape, are images derived from convict carvings on the Ross Bridge and from the time honored tradition of water-divining (which I practice).
It is important to me to visit these sites of inspiration, to understand the history of Tasmania much closer and the peoples who were displaced from it, and through my own vision make new artworks.”
- Garry Nichols
“Nichols is a painter’s painter. The lush stipple of his application, the knowledge of materials, the sheer plastic pleasure, yet at the same time, so steeped is he in his search for authentic pictorial truth, he has to refuse the merely painterly. . . His paintings are a consequence of this trekking back through the tantalizing media of paint into the fecund visual trove of memory, of his youth, combined with his highly sohisticated modernist imagination. What he’s after is the mystery. . . the untouchable, the uncertain, the unmentionable.
The widening ripple the plummeting rock leaves on the lake’s surface, he can surely paint, but the rock that’s falling through the water, imperceptably turning back to its surrounding. . . the transitory is what he’s after.”
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