The Brooklyn Rail

Graham Nickson was an artist who inspired so many, including me, through his work and his ambition—but also as a mentor, colleague, and friend.

Facing, as we do, the threats and possibilities of artificial intelligence, it is inspiring to remember Graham as a staunch advocate for the development of Human Intelligence.

It was such an honor to teach with Graham in the painting atelier at the Studio School. Over time, I watched Graham become a master of the Socratic method. His critiques were legendary: time stopped, there were no boundaries; hours could be spent looking at a painting, talking about its formal aspects, yes—but also intention, metaphor and mystery, or something as ephemeral as the layers of meaning embedded in a gesture.

His scope of interest was encyclopedic. He would talk about everything from Olmec Colossal Heads to contemporary painting. He spoke in riddles like a druid, like a poet of painting. Many a time, a frustrated student would come to me asking me to explain what Graham meant during a critique. There really weren’t any easy answers, because Graham intended to provoke. He wanted them to question, to think. He often said, “We are here to get the questions, not the answers.”

For Graham, form was tied to meaning. Art is its own language, painting is its own language, and the search for the image is a profound endeavor. Graham saw deep meaning in form and in a tradition that goes back to those profound images in the Lascaux and Chauvet caves, made with a burnt stick, the same material that he himself wielded with such force and grace.

Those shamans in the caves summoned the spirits of the bison, horses, and stags they depicted. They used mystical symbols and marks, and left their hand prints to say, “We are here.” Graham, too, looked for the mysteries in painting. The undecipherable Tempest by Georgione was a work he returned to as a great example of the possibility of mystery and power in painting.

Here is another mystery: a straight line back to those caves, to Egyptian Fayoum portraits, to the splendor of Russian icon painting—the inexplicable and powerful nexus of three colors in a painting, Graham spoke about it often, a secret code or key, used by so many artists that it becomes a cypher. The colors? Black, white, and red. They can be found coalescing not only in work by Matisse, Joan Brown, and Guston, but also in the most silvery paintings of Corot. Look for it and you will see it everywhere—including in the work of Graham Nickson.

This brings me to think of the poem On Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh:

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known/ To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone/ And word and tint. I did not stint, I gave her poems to say.

That secret sign, that intangible, unnamable thing that you can only discover through the process of painting. If forced, it will be hollow, empty. That is form. The process of finding form and image might be slow, but what it brings is something beyond what we might think we are capable of. It is transcendence.

God bless Graham for upholding that ideal in a world that fights so hard against it, that seems to care only for immediate gratification, shiny surfaces, easy answers and modern-day snake-oil salesmen. It was a true and noble endeavor, and there are thousands of artists and lovers of art all around the world who were touched by Graham’s passion and drive—who, through the kind of osmosis he performed in his critiques and marathons, were able to embrace that search as their own. His is a phenomenal legacy.

Graham expected us to be as ambitious as he was. There were no excuses. He loved excess. Work bigger, work harder, risk it all, tear it down, kill your darlings, and then build it back up again, repeat. If you can’t afford a studio, get a bigger studio, or get two! Don’t hold back.

Although many of his works were very large in scale, his small watercolors and paintings of the sunset and sunrise really encompassed this obsession. How many paintings does a person really need to make of a rising or setting sun? Again, a secret sign, a deep connection to the possibility of renewal, reverie, the sun goddess returning again with a new mystery for us. Graham showed us these mysteries in all their resplendent glory, and his sun still rises. For this I give him my most profound thanks.