Articles / Press releases
Listed are selected articles and press releases that were written about
Garry's work. Including New York, Australian and Tasmanian publications.
Michael Brenson, The New York Times
"... artists who are just beginning to gain reputations, such as Glenn Goldberg, Richard Mock, Michael McKeown, Joyce Pensato, Garry Nichols, Elena Sisto and Emily Cheng. What all the artists have in common - and what makes this show so striking - is an ease and freedom with materials and craft that is now quite rare."
Samantha Nelson, WaterfrontWeek
“Amarin Cafe displays a collection of charcoal drawings by Tasmanian-born artist Garry Nichols. Both abstract and precisely documented, Nichols depicts tropical flowers and foliage in stark black and white strongly influencd by Aboriginal culture and art. Nichols work has a linear quality and primitiveness, which plays off the abstract nature of each piece.
Indvidual drawings are carefully framed to capture intricate detail up close, allowing the framing of the
subject to reveal another meaning. In this case, the artist balances highly sexual and phallic shapes in a manner reminiscent of Mapplethorpe, transforming them back into detailed plant imagery.”
Eileen Chanin, Australian Collector's Quarterly
"Tasmanian born Garry Nichols is an artist whose works are firmly grounded in response to landscape. Inspired by the Australian landscape of his childhood, he paints symbols developed from his recollection of Australian landscape alongside symbols developed from water divining (dowsing and water-witching) learned from his father-in-law. His palette reflects the colour and lushness of remembered Australian landscape. His plant-inspired imagery possesses sinuous vibrancy and organic quality evocative of late 19th century plant-inspired forms of the Jugendstijl, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. In Brooklyn's urban jungle of container yards and billboards, Nichols is a Pacific exotic: his 'oceanic forms' evoke Nolde's luminous watercolours and the native opulence of Gauguin."
"Sign and symbol"
Shirley Apthorp interviews artist Garry Nichols
during a return visit to his native Tasmania
Garry Nichols cradles his cappucino and looks thoughtful. The topic of conversation has been Aboriginal spirituality and his relationship with the Tasmanian landscape. For an artist with such strong creative and thematic ties to things Australian, Nichols cuts an unlikely figure. He sports an extravagant moustache and an unashamedly American baseball cap; his speech slides softly between Australian drawl and New York twang.
Born and raised in Tasmania, Nichols worked and studied in New South Wales, travelled around Europe, and settled in New York, where he has lived for the past 13 years. He and his family are making a short return visit to his birthplace, and he is finding his time here refreshing and inspiring.
Since a Marten Bequest Travelling Art Prize took him to London in 1977, Nichols has visited Australia only twice, but now, more than ever, all of his work is strongly and inextricably linked to this country, especially to Tasmania.
A Peter Brown Scholarship enabled him to commence studies at the New York Studio School in 1978, and successive scholarships allowed him to remain a student there for seven years. The colour and vibrancy of New York attracted him, and at the conclusion of his studies, having met his wife Deborah, he began to carve out a living in the tough art world of the city.
"I was still drawing on landscape influence and the influence of Australia -- its light and colour, and my years of growing up in Tasmania," he says. "I simplified the subject matter down to pattern, and finally to symbols, using them together with the landscape imagery."
Symbols now play a vital part in Nichols' work. Drawn from his surroundings, his observations, dreams, favourite objects, childhood memories, and dowsing, or waterdivining, they dominate his work and infuse it meanings, allusions, and hints of magic and mystery.
Some of his earlier symbols developed from his first trip back to Australia in 1986. He spent some time on a friend's New South Wales fruit farm, where he made many drawings of the plant life, developing a particular fascination with the shape and interplay of banana palm leaves.
Some of the drawings he sold immediately to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the rest he took back to New York, where they continued to provide source material for his paintings for many years.
"I didn't have a strong sense of why I was drawing a symbol in the beginning. As I did more of them, and repeated the symbol over and over again, it became more potent, and developed its own life."
Later, he began to use symbols from dowsing, a practice he had learned from his father-in-law. In his work today, one of his most consistently used symbols is the winding line which travels through the canvas. This is derived from the movement of the divining pendulum over a map. Initially, he had used the divining rod as a symbol in his work, but moved away from it to the less overt pendulum track in order to enable the viewer to participate more actively.
"I wanted some shapes in my paintings that weren't easily recognisable. I wanted them to have a multiplicity of readings, and I wanted the viewer to go into the paintings, to look at them and wonder what they were, and to draw their own conclusions, or to bring their own experiences and combine that with what the painting was showing," he says.
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