-->Reprinted on Berkshire Fine Arts with some interesting comments not printed here.
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| Tim Nichols(work from around 2007) |
My friend Addison recently wondered if we both had the
tendency to churn the same ideas over and over in our blogs. He chides his
readers for not appreciating how to enjoy the freedom they have been bequeathed
as artists by spending too much time trying to figure out where they fit into
the art scene. The art culture does a good job uniting buyers, critics,
galleries and museums to convince us of a status quo and we are hard wired to
bow down to authority whatever it may be at any given time. I have tried in my
blogs to jump out of the noise of contemporary art as well by imagining an
ideal art scene where artists speak to each other from across generations and
participate in a kind of cosmic art dance. Its only premise is that the past
has a lot to teach and any movement forward has to arise out of a dialogue with
the past. I suspect that Addison would find that too much of a constraint. But
unlike me he can make the claim that he once had a niche within the scene in
the 80’s with shows at blue chip New York galleries. If he says ignore the
scene and be free he knows what kind of stranglehold that world can place on
one’s creativity, as his novel so passionately stated in its title:” Life and
Art, in that order.” For me there was nothing to lose as I had an inordinate
talent for always going in the opposite direction of any group that claimed to
be the center of the universe, such as going to Paris after my MFA at Yale when
the scene was clearly in New York. I have always just plodded along talking to
my artistic ghosts.
So some artists are picked out of a hat or so it seems to
strut on the scene. Their work is shown regularly, collected and written about.
Of life’s unfairness we should be constantly reminded. It is a subject of a few
of Addison’s blogs. His answer: get over it. There is one and only one reason
we should not dwell on it: it is bad for your health. Nietzsche devoted a great
deal of ink to his analysis of “ressentiment”. Dionysian that he was, He too
wanted people to be free to create not weighed down by anger at the system. He
preached Health.
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| In a private collection purchased in the 90's |
Tim Nichols, Boston painter, legendary teacher at the
Museum School and friend, who died several years ago in his late 70’s, comes to
mind as someone who struggled for recognition and was never granted it. He was
someone who cared deeply about a lot of things. Maybe because he was already a
practicing Harvard and Columbia trained corporate lawyer when he decided to
pursue painting he knew that art comes from within, and is in conflict with the
veneer of the world of commerce. Unlike the contemporary content providers that
litter Newbury Street and SOWA he was incapable of giving the galleries what
they wanted. Boston has always suffered from a sense of its own history and the
current choices in the galleries run the gamut from Boston Expressionist
schmaltz to John Singer Sargent wannabees with a good deal of neutered art
objects that go well over the divans of Boston’s moneyed class...I gave him a
show at the Art Institute of Boston in the early 90’s and to my mind he was the
best painter in Boston. It was work informed by abstract expressionism, which
was banned by the Boston expressionists as too French, but he didn’t pursue its
purely energetic goals. In that sense there was always something indigestible
about his work. Each painting seemed to deal with some inner vision tangled in
the web of day to day life. The only artist I can think of who resembles him is
John Walker. He went off to work each day like someone going into battle. There
were wars to be won, wrongs to be righted. I recall an all night bout of
drinking that ended with a discourse on the misery of the lives of those in the
ghetto that he knew his art could not help. He brought this same kind of
proselytizing to his teaching and in turn did attract admirers such as Jim
Falck, an artist who abandoned a career as chief landscape architect for the
MDC late in life to become an artist.
We first met at the Bromfield Gallery, a coop gallery, in
Boston where I was briefly a member in the late 70’s and again in the mid
nineties. He was living with the Chicago based still life painter Catherine
Maize, whom I had met at Yale / Norfolk in 1970. He remained a committed member
of the gallery until he died. Exhibiting in a coop gallery provided him a
self-image as outsider, free from the art industry and allied with the
community of artists. Since I was out of touch with him in later years I don’t
know what kind of success he had there .The last time I heard about him was
when we were included in Addison Parks” Severed Ear “show at Crieger Dane.
There was some chatter about how he had someone deliver the work for him while
he waited outdoors on Newbury St
.He did not want set foot in a commercial gallery. He did
not come to the opening.
The only images I have of his work are several that exist
on a site” Slow Art”. They are among his last work. They seem serene not
tormented and not typical of the work I recall from the 90’s. When I learned
belatedly of his death I tried to introduce his work to Chawky Frenn who was
writing at the time a two-volume work on Boston Artists for inclusion in the
series. I did succeed through the dean at The Museum School in contacting is
children by email but nothing came of it. It is unfortunate. I would like to
think that future historians will stumble across his work and acknowledge its
superiority.
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| Tim Nichols(around 2007) |
Nichols stayed committed to being an artist in Boston. He
stayed loyal to his coop and taught vigorously until his retirement. As far as
being continuously out of sync with Boston’s artistic seasons I suspect that he
didn’t heed Parks’ advice: He didn’t get over it. Unlike current artists who favor
antidepressants he was more in the style of Bukowski when it came to
self-medication.
Tim was always on the ramparts, trying to overcome what
he saw as the inherent unfairness of a system where people go about their roles
in the art establishment like somnambulists. Art has become corporate and the
artists are just content providers. Art had saved him from a life as a
corporate lawyer and he spent the rest of his life spreading the word of art’s
sacred content, that a painting is a poem where as Wallace Stevens said we
perceive “ghostlier demarcations keener sounds”.
follow up blog
follow up blog
