Beacon Dispatch: Don Nice Brings The Hudson Home

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An artist’s love affair with the natural world swims into Beacon

by Jeffery Battersby

Don Nice—whose latest show "Hudson River Fish" is on display at the Rivers & Estuaries Center —is an outdoorsman; a man whose artwork is informed and infused by the world around him.

Growing up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where his father was in the citrus business, he worked as a ranch hand and then as a mule packer taking campers into the Sierra. To this day he has the rugged, handsome look of a at home on the back of a horse. It was also these years that influenced the way he looks at the world, his love of the outdoors, and fuels his desire to capture everything he sees in his artwork.

After high school Don went to the University of California on a football scholarship. Around the end of the Korean War, and right after he graduated from college, he volunteered for the draft, joined the army, and worked as a military artist at Fort Ord on California’s Monterey Peninsula. While there he created cartoons for the newspaper, silk-screened, and even painted a mural in the Fort Ord mess hall. Throughout this time he continued to draw and paint. It was also at this time that he began reading the works of Jack Kerouac and listening to music that he had never heard before. This began to make him think of ways to push himself artistically. “I was pressing the limits of the whole thing. I got a studio in Carmel and I was painting. Painting, painting after painting on the base. I was reading books and listening to Vivaldi records, which [before this] I knew nothing about and I was getting culture.” Shortly after he finished his stint in the military he moved to Italy
to further pursue his artistic endeavors. He planned to live in Europe for the rest of his life.

It was while Don was in Europe that he met his wife Sandra, an American working as a model in Paris, and where he was also introduced to abstract expressionism in the work of Jackson Pollack and Willem DeKoonig. “When I saw my first Pollack I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t believe it. I told Sandra at the time, ‘I’m going back to live in America.’ After that it took me five years to get DeKoonig out of my system. I was just being DeKoonig.”

Back in America he married Sandra and was accepted into a graduate painting program at Yale. It was while he was at Yale that he began thinking, once again, of how to change the direction of his work. He had been painting as an abstract expressionist, but he wanted try something new. “Then I had this idea. I decided to do the very thing that the abstract expressionists were telling people not to even think about. That is, to paint something.”

“I started painting a bunch of grapes, with absolutely no real impact. Then I took the idea of a single image against a neutral background, and, since scale has always been an important thing in America, I painted a bunch of nine-foot grapes. Now, you can’t really walk past a bunch of nine foot grapes so, [because of its size], it was like abstract painting.” Nice continued to create large images that played at the fringes of pop-art: lobster, beets, onions, a
pack of gum, a piece of pie. And then he began pushing the idea further, combining these single, disparate images into one complete image. He created totems, groups of separate yet related objects. Sunglasses, sneakers, a bottle of soda, and a bag of popcorn. A Bear. A riverscape. Oranges. A bird and a squirrel. “I was transforming these single images into a whole image and a
[complete] object. It’s not sculpture, but it’s very close to it.”

The fish that now hang in the Rivers and Estuaries Center
extend this idea of sculpture even further. They’re paintings, but not in the
usual sense. They’re natural pigments painted on an anodized aluminum surface
and then mounted on a one-inch thick wooden base. The wood is more than just a
means to mount the images; it’s an integral part of the image itself. It’s
meant to bring his artwork into three dimensions. With these fish—and the rest
of his recent work—Nice is again playing with and expanding the boundaries of
his painting, pressing it even closer to the physical quality of sculpture. He
says that he’s still trying to break the mold. By using aluminum Nice says that
the light no longer comes to rest in the painting itself. Instead it moves back
out of the painting and comes to meet the viewer.

“I work with very traditional subject matter. If you paint a
bear in oil or a fish in watercolor you’re stuck in time. It’s like the
nineteenth century. But if I do that same fish on aluminum it has a step on it
that deals with light and light has always been important in painting. So
aluminum for me was a way to step forward with the idea that the light is not
going to stay in the work, it’s going to come back again.”

It’s that very light that will make you come back again as
well.

Don Nice’s show will
remain at the Rivers & Estuaries Center—199 Main Street, Beacon—through
August 24th. For information and hours please call: 845-838-1600<o:p></o:p>

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Beacon Dispatch

Local correspondents exploring history, politics, commerce, and culture in Beacon, NY

Issue 28: December 2006 / January 2007

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