In the Boston Globe Cate McQuaid reports that George Nick, one of the teachers at Massachusetts College of Art when I got my BFA back in the day, may be 82, but he’s still growing as a painter. “His exhibit at Gallery NAGA is alive with texture, and tone, and particularly with light, as if Nick is constantly reawakening to its beauties and pitfalls. Nick continues to paint looming, sun-wracked visions of Back Bay architecture, interiors, and still lifes. His brushwork gets looser and more experimental; many of these paintings have the shimmer of hallucination about them. In ‘Robert Treat Paine’s Stonehurst, Waltham MA 23 Oct 2007,’ the arched stone entryway and the mansard roof look more organic, in their curvature, tilt, and swell, than architectural.
“The bravura ‘Tribute to John Updike 26 Jan 2009’ (Nick and Updike were friends) has us looking across a Concord storefront to a church in the distance, with piles of many-colored snow along the way. Glance through two windows of the corner store and glimpse the church beyond: The light and reflection bounce through those layers of glass and space and accumulate into a cocktail of built-up yellows and peaches. Call that Nick’s nirvana.”
“George Nick: The Coded Process,” Gallery NAGA, Boston, MA. Through May 30.
