Backlight, 82x56cm, 2010. |
Australian Artist for the Malaysia-Australia Visual Artists' Residency 2012
About the artist
Jonathan Nichols lives in Melbourne, where he works as an artist, and sometimes as a
curator and writer. He has maintained a studio-based painting practice since graduating from
the School of Art at the Australian National University in 1988 and completing postgraduate
studies at the University of NSW in 1989. He has exhibited widely in Australia, including at
private art galleries, public museums and artist-run spaces. In 2010, he was included in the
exhibition Present tense: an imagined grammar of portraiture in the digital age at the National
Portrait Gallery in Canberra.
In June 2011 Nichols spent four months in Liverpool attached to the Liverpool Biennial and
funded by the Australia Council. After completing his studio residency in the UK, he travelled
to Germany to exhibit along with three other Australians in Schnittmengen/Intersections at the
Emmanuel Walderdorff Galerie, Cologne.
About the art
Jonathan Nichols uses the human figure as a point of correlation or orientation in his
painting—the figure becomes both cipher and affect. His paintings have been described as
conveying ‘the experience of seeing someone at a distance’, which is recorded ‘as a sort of
touch or feeling of proximity’.
Nichols is interested in the possibilities that connect and run between people. His subjects are
found in various digital media or other research material or in person, but generally maintain
their anonymity. He is interested in painterly ground rules and ideas as well as the potential
for new motifs and chance associations.
His work takes a painterly form that is fundamentally connected to manual ability and his own
creative desires—establishing a clear aesthetic distance from more technologically complex
methods of production. Nonetheless, for Nichols, thinking about a painting first starts by
sourcing digital images. Figurative elements are selected and collaged on the computer
screen before he paints these directly onto the canvas. Using the computer and its screen in
this way delivers for Nichols a certain level of introspective inquiry that then independently
affects the look and feel of each finished painting.
Residency plans
Jonathan Nichols’s immediate plan at Rimbun Dahan is to research and develop new
figurative motifs drawn from his experience in Malaysia. New motifs will be sourced from
street scenes and popular media, thinking about culture and history, everyday society and
forms of portraiture. He is interested in figurative studies (or visual storytelling) that can bridge
or define cultural traditions and aesthetics, for example those associated with the Malay,
Chinese, Indian and indigenous people. Nichols is keen to spend time discovering how these
interconnect with his own knowledge of Western painterly traditions; to learn what is held in
common between artists and what is not.
For more information visit http://www.jonathan-nichols.blogspot.com/ |
