“Reprinted” from Rio Grande Sun - ARTS, Espanola, New Mexico, May 23, 2019

PAINTINGS AND WOODWORK - ROBERT NICOLAIS

El Rito paintiner and woodworker Robert Nicolais said he’s not sure what an artistic philosophy would be if he actually thought he had one. “I’m interested in how people perceive things and I think humans need to get away from their tiny but destructive world and engage with the natural world. A mountain we can see now is a showing of just a part of a many million-year history. It will change, the bosque will change, humans will change but all on different scales of time.” Nicolais explainted.

The artist currently has paintings and wood sculptures on display at Galleria Arriba, which is located at the Abiquiu Inn in Abiquiu.

PERSONAL HISTORY

“My connection with Northern New Mexico goes back to the summer of 1964 when I worked on a University of New Mexico archeological dig near Sapawe pueblo near El Rito.” Nicolais said. “Coincidence brought me back to El Rito. After architecture school I wanted to come back to the southwest. Friends of mine introduced me to Peter van Dresser who had several projects going in El Rito related to solar design and energy efficiency. I worked for him for several years and later I taught drafting at Northern New Mexico Community College. I bought some property in the area and did my own riff on Henry David Thoreau building an adobe building. I made and laid the adobes, cut the vigas for the roof in the nearby National Forest and framed the roof myself. In architecture I focused on solar and energy efficient buildings. I also taught owner/builder solar and adobe workshops around the southwest.

I’ve always enjoyed woodworking. I have built furniture of my own design as well as reproductions of R.M. Schindler furniture for the Schindler House in Los Angeles, Calvin Klein Company in New York and Europe, and for several different architects. I also build some Frank Lloyd Wright lamps which had never been fabricated, for the Storrer House in Los Angeles. My birthday present to myself on my 60th birthday was entry in a marathon. I’m up to about 20 marathons, now I just jog and I’m getting slower and slower. But I still enjoy it. I currently split my time between El Rito and Los Angeles, which is quite a contrast.”

NICOLAIS’ ARTISTIC INFLUENCES

“Two painters have certainly influenced me,” Nicolais said. “First Cezanne. He builds colors with layers, painting and overpainting, sometimes with glazes. I like that complexity to the surface. And there is often a move to geometry in the way he breaks down an object. I also like many of Georgia O’Keefe’s landscapes with her color palette and a tendency toward simplification. I also very much like the Barbizon painters, particularly their informal works. The Beaux-Arts method included ‘etudes’ and ‘esquisses,’ studies and sketches, which were to be done rapidly. I prefer these works to the final formal salon pictures. In the Beaux-Arts system landscapes ranked low in their hierarchy of subjects but I like the feeling you get when you are drawn into a nice landscape painting. These rapid Barbizon paintings show the brushwork, and I am in awe of the Chinese traditions where the brushwork is so integral to the painting and almost a subject in itself.”

Nicolais said he doesn’t really know what the role of the artist is supposed to be in society.

I certainly don’t know what my role is,’ he candidly said. “I want my work to make people think about the natural world.”

Nicolais’ architectural influences come across in his paintings. They are painterly – in a fine art fashion – but contain an occasional line that is more indicative of an architectural drawing than a fine art painting. It’s as if he wants his viewers to realize that these are representations of a scene and not meant to replace the original experience of being in the location.

“My paintings are figurative,” Nicolais said. “I like the idea of using an object as a subject but I want to put the object at a remove. I don’t want to paint a literal picture of something but rather try to paint the idea of the object. Ideas shift, perception changes and there are different ways of looking at something. One’s focus changes in front of an object. I want to incorporate some of that uncertainty in a painting. I like the idea of working with fragments of things seen and remembered, and making a picture of these fragments by a sort of bricolage. After reading Gaston Bachelard’s “Poetics of Space.” I was taken with the idea of looking for images that trigger a set of associations, this is what I’m working on now. I don’t think an image is unitary and complete but made up of bits and pieces and one can look at it and see it in different ways at once. I also use geometry layered in a painting to pull the image away from representation.

“Geometry is something universal, it’s as true in a galaxy a billion light years away as it is here. Geometry is absolute but a painting is just a bit of color and line on a surface.”

Crafting frames lets Nicolais extend the simple geometry out beyond the edge of a painting, and he admits to liking to emphasize the color, grain and nature of the wood for its own sake.

A number of paintings in this exhibit showcase the artist’s attraction to the bosque.  “I like the bosque as a subject because it is so dense and complicated, just like nature. It is impossible to see the whole forest; the parts are so different. With still lifes I like to emphasize brush strokes and complicate a simple image. A mountain or ridge line is a different order of nature, remote and unmovable,” Nicolais said, and then added. “And underlying everything is geometry.”

Although Nicolais said he didn’t thing there was a particular life event that has influenced his art, he did say, “I used to do backpacking, particularly in the eastern slope of the Sierras. The vistas you get in the wilds are pretty impressive.” With that backpacking in mind, Nicolais said he’s always liked landscapes.

“I love to be outdoors and the world is pretty amazing. I don’t paint humans; they are pretty problematic,” Nicolais explained.

NICOLAIS’ TECHNIQUE

“I like to do watercolors outdoors on site, but I do my oil paintings in my studio and I work and rework the composition and images and colors. I do my studio paintings from photos and I will take parts from several photos,” Nicolais explained. “For me the hardest part is getting a feeling for where you want to go with a painting.”

Nicolais said he creates his art because, “I just like to make things. A painting can include lots of ideas, they don’t need to be articulated, but they are there under the surface. I think anyone can make art. People used to make a lot of folk art before there were so many diversions. I don’t have any TV or electronic internet diversions in El Rito so I have to make things.

“If someone asks me what I do, I usually say ‘I make things.’ The satisfaction of making something, a drawing, a bit of woodworking, a painting, is immense. I think doing anything material gives satisfaction whether it is mowing a field well or painting a satisfying picture.”

Does Nicolais consider his art unique? “I think any work is a reflection of the person making it,” he said. “If you get 20 people together and say ‘draw this apple’ you will get 20 different versions of an apple.”

In addition to his paintings, Nicolais also has some wood sculptures – he refers to them as “panels” – that are interspersed with paintings.“With my wood panels I like to play with geometry and spatial perception, and I enjoy making frames that complement my paintings,” Nicolais said. Although the panels differ dramatically from his paintings, their serenity and compositional excellence blend nicely with the paintings.

“I think a successful piece of art makes a person stop and look at it.” Nicolais explained. “There can be a particularly beautiful combination of colors, a composition that makes you stop and notice it, an image that has a resonance. What I’m thinking about now is combining images that have a resonance (hopefully) in a way that makes you stop and look. A bosque has a way of triggering associations, same for a ridgeline, a grand mountain, a detail of the ground. I want to put some of these things together in a way that interests and engages the viewer.”

This is a strong exhibit with some wonderful landscape images and geometrical wood panels. The only hiccup – and it’s slight – are the still life paintings. They just don’t seem to fit in with the landscapes and panels, which fit nicely together. It’s a show well worth your visit to Galleria Arriba