The Brooklyn Rail

If we accept the shorthand description of painting as a language, then Graham Nickson was the most elegantly fluent artist I will ever know. In his work and teaching he moved with the ease of true understanding between the physical and metaphorical facets of his art form with erudition, flair, and a rare and generous desire to give and communicate through his life’s work. I studied with him at the Studio School from 2004–06, before working as his studio assistant, and then worked in the Dean’s office until 2011. He was, as I came to know him in these varying roles, principled, consistent, and a truly original thinker and educator.

Graham understood better than anyone the strange mechanics by which painting extends its meaning beyond two-dimensions. Looking at Chardin’s bowl of strawberries, a favorite of his, he would emphasize the rendering of the individual berries: volumetric and whole, weightily (for such tiny fruits!) resting on and pushing against the others in a pyramidal gathering exuding color and life. In Graham’s teaching, the berries became synonymous with an embodied experience of sight, in which the artist’s gaze and hand are linked to a continuum of natural vitality: the berries are a sensation of forces, a period of time, a way of thinking. They are little worlds unto themselves.

Seen in all their fullness, Chardin’s strawberries stand in for a constellation of associations, but they are, after all, berries first, and in an echo of that same logic, Graham’s teaching was based foremost on drawing from perception. The aim, I believe, had little—or perhaps nothing—to do with accurate rendering, but instead to develop the ability to bring a heightened level of curiosity and intention to the act of observation. This quality of attention, transmitted in the drawn or painted mark, was one Graham could sense as clearly as most people hear a human voice.

He was known for critiquing drawings with a laser pointer, using its incisive dot to lead students’ eyes into the most subtle passages of a drawing. He might highlight a moment of awkward beauty within the work of a student struggling that day, or caution another against a line that was becoming schematic or routine. I remember in my first classes with him a sense of dynamism becoming unlocked between the depth and surface geometries of one ankle drawn next to another, for example, or within the shape of a slightly receding plane. For Graham, every inch of a drawing—whether completed or in progress—mattered, not from the formal concern of a piece “working” but because it revealed a universe of intention. Graham saw the works of beloved masters through the same lens, and his informal slide talks uncovered a kind of “inner life” running like a lit fuse through the paintings of Piero to Signorelli to Bonnard, Matisse, and beyond. His teaching felt like an initiation into a world so many of us yearned to join.

It has taken me years to appreciate the humility of Graham’s teaching, given that his approach was characterized by the most marvelous sense of scale. From the intensity of his marathon program, the wildness of projects in which great big drawings were built up, torn down, and reconfigured, to the sumptuousness of his recommended palette, Graham sought out confrontations with challenge, and perhaps even impossibility. I see now he was not prescribing ways to make work, but building the courage and stamina needed for the vulnerable, sometimes irrational, endeavor of being an artist. He tried to devise as many concrete experiences as he could as a teacher, but always with the intention of them being a means towards open-ended possibility, in art and life.

He treasured spontaneity, and despite the aura of discipline that surrounded his atelier, he had a playful wit, linked to the wisdom that life simply does not always match our plans and desires. I remember him assessing a somewhat clumsily proportioned figure study in a critique once: “We all feel like this sometimes” was his only comment following a silence, as he laser-circled the figure that was suddenly perfectly expressive of a moment of wilted spirits.

I have always thought that Graham had the most natural authority as a teacher, which stemmed purely from his extraordinary devotion to the art form. As I write, however, I realize that his love of painting, expressed another way, was a love for people, and a rich sense of humanity informed all he aimed to accomplish. He was fiercely egalitarian and treated with seriousness and respect anyone, regardless of age or life station, who had that spark of desire to learn and to work. Graham’s ability to see the artist within his students could be immeasurably powerful, and for so many of us was a genuinely life-changing gift.