William Nichols

William Nichols, Overgrown Garden, oil on canvas, 63" x 110", 1984. William Nichols (born 1942) is an American artist known for highly detailed, tactile landscape paintings that combine physical scale with intimacy. Nichols developed his mature style in the 1970s, combining painterly traditions going back to Impressionism with reemerging movements such as Realism and Photorealism; critic John Perreault called his approach, "Photo-Impressionism." He has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including at OK Harris Gallery in New York (1979–2013), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), and Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon); In addition to reviews in national publications, and Contemporary American Realism Since 1960, Gallerist Ivan Karp wrote, "the vital pulse" of Nichols's paintings defies "the conviction that 400 years of depictions of the natural world nullify the ability of living artists to produce landscapes of high consequence."

Life and career Nichols was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1942. He spent parts of his youth in upper Wisconsin hiking, fishing and exploring, memories of which continue to inform his work. He studied at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 1966), before earning an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1968; a Fulbright Hayes Grant facilitated postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1968–9. During this early period, he painted in an abstract expressionist style, before turning to surrealist-flavored figurative work, and slightly surreal landscapes after college.

In the early 1970s, Nichols reconceived his work from scratch, turning to the landscape, and painting from nature, like the Impressionists. His mature, painterly realist vocabulary developed intuitively and incorporated influences from Impressionism to Japanese woodblock prints and screens; inspired by photography's ability to capture fleeting qualities of light with precision and clarity, he began using it as reference to facilitate a more thorough reflection on specific, sometimes extraordinary moments or events, such as the freak, early snowstorm depicted in First Snow Santa Fe (2012). he has also shown at galleries such as Tory Folliard (Milwaukee), Robert Kidd (Birmingham), and Thomas Paul (Los Angeles), and internationally, in Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Philippines, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Taiwan. that American Arts Quarterly wrote "might appeal on abstract terms to admirers of Jackson Pollock." He differs, however, from the detached preference for banal, hard, clean reflective surfaces of many Photorealists, both in his softer, moodier, more romantic approach and his interest in his pictorial subjects.

Collections and recognition Nichols's work belongs to the public collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Butler Institute of American Art, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Haggerty Museum, Erie Art Museum, Museum of New Art (MONA), Rahr West Art Museum, Stanford University, and the State of Illinois Governor's Mansion;

Nichols has been featured in several art historical surveys of Realism and landscape painting, including Contemporary American Realism Since 1960 (1981), Facing Reality: Twentieth-Century American Realist and Realistic Drawings in Perspective (1986), Spirit of Place: Contemporary Landscape Painting & The American Tradition (1989), The Artist and the American Landscape(1998), Green Woods & Crystal Waters: The American Landscape Tradition (2000), and Landschaft Als Weltsicht.