"An Apotropaic Symphony"

Richard Nickolson

October 5 - 27, 2012

Reception IDADA First Friday, October 5, 6-9 pm

Back Door to Baghdad, 2004

3 3/8" x 4 1/2"

Dewclaw welcomes guest artist Richard Emery Nickolson for October. He will present "An Apotropaic Symphony", a selection of watercolors on paper which reference pictographic symbols, both historical and current. Richard served as a Professor of Painting, Drawing, Foundations Studies and Critical Thinking at the Herron School of Art and Design, IUPUI, from 1973 to 2010.  

"The sources and inspirations for these paintings arise from certain pre-historic sites such as the ‘alignements’ in Brittany in western France, the site known as ‘newspaper rock’ in Moab, Utah and finally to carvings from the very northern reaches of Alaska and the Canadian Rockies.  These were of course examples of pictographs from very different cultures, prior to the invention of language.  They have now been combined with more immediate references to elements in American art and history.

Straight or jagged lines easily become signs for rain or lightening bolts. House shapes from either the Philadelphia carpenter’s guidebook or Indiana Amish quilts appear as both representational and abstract. These works, all watercolors on paper, seek to bridge this gap between traditional oppositions. They function in the very same way that elements in early modern painting were meant to be symbolic. The short essay by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater titled “Thought Forms” proposed these and other symbols and their use in painting. This form of abstraction has also been a powerful influence on my current work.

From “An American Frame” to “The Reliquary for the Language of Lost Birds,” this series of paintings seeks to explore and synthesize a variety of responses to both contemporary issues and historical references.  As a contemporary painter, I often have the feeling that I am a reincarnated transcendentalist, living in and witnessing the death throes of the post-modern era." 

-  R.Nickolson, September 2012

In addition to his professorship, Richard received an MFA from Indiana University, a BFA from the Maryland Institute, and was assigned to the Office, Chief of Military History and the United States Army Combat Artist Team XI in 1970-1971.

In 2002, His work was featured in two solo shows at the Indianapolis Art Center as part of a program series, "The Art of Combat: Artists and the Viet Nam War, Then and Now".He received a Creative Renewal Fellowship in 2005-6. He served as a Visiting Professor of Painting, Drawing and Journaling at the Pont'Aven School of Contemporary Art in the summers of 1995,1997,2000, and 2007. Richard has served as Artist-in-Residence at St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's College, Millay Colony, Austerlitz, NY, the Ossabaw Island Project, Savannah, Georgia, Alfred University, Alfred, NY, the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweet Briar, Virginia. In the spring of 2010 the Board tof Trustees of Indiana University voted to award him with the title of Professor Emeritus at the Herron School of Art & Design.