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CHICAGO ARTISAN:

Landscape painter William Nichols portrays the journey, not the destination

BY PAMELA DITTMER McKUEN

Imagine yourself hiking a woodland trail, dodging wayward branches and muddy creeks in pursuit of a vaunted overlook with far-reaching views of astounding natural beauty. Finally, you arrive and snap a few photos for the gram. Then you turn around and scurry back to the trailhead.

William Nichols shows you what you missed along the way. The Skokie-based landscape artist forgoes mountain ranges and jeweled sunsets, instead focusing on the terrain. He simply paints whatever he encounters: the fallen log bisecting an unnamed stream, the random bough coated in lichen, a glimmer of late-day sunlight peering through the canopy, tangles of wild vegetation.

"What I do is not so much landscape but looking at nature up close," he says. "Most of my work is middle ground and foreground, which is a distinctive way of looking at nature."

As Lauren Ellis, who represents Nichols' work at CK Contemporary in San Francisco, puts it, "Unlike the typical landscape where you are looking at a composed vista, Bill brings you into the landscape in this immediate way where you feel you are experiencing it first-hand. It's like you are traversing the landscape and looking down as you walk."

Another aspect of Nichols' work that merits mention is the sheer size. His paintings are measured in feet rather than inches, almost life-size or greater, to immerse the viewer in the setting.

"When I'm looking at my (William Nichols) paintings, I'm inside that small section of garden or creek," says Tory Folliard, whose eponymous gallery in Milwaukee has repped Nichols since 1990.

A Change in Direction

Nichols began painting while attending high school in the late 1950s, a time of artistic turbulence. Surrealism, expressionism, abstractionism and pop were at the forefront, and he followed suit. He attended the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Illinois and did postgraduate study as a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar at Slade School of Art at University College in London. Afterward, he began a 25-year career teaching art at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

Although his early paintings sold well, by the early 1970s, Nichols was restless. He felt compelled to find his own style rather than continue to translate popular trends.

"It was difficult," he recalls. "You want to hang onto things around you that are successful and be part of the crowd."

Turning his attention to landscapes, he drew upon the joyous summers of his youth, which he spent with relatives in a wooded rural area of Wisconsin called Fall Creek. His days were filled with hiking, fishing and exploring, and, as a city boy, he reveled in the wonder and solitude of it all.

At first, he worked from memory with the belief that relying on photographs was a sort of cheating. Eventually, he realized the images in his mind didn't provide the depth of character he sought. In search of greater authenticity, he returned to the natural environment with a camera in tow. Many of his locations are mundane, perhaps the side of a road or an undistinguished forest. He donned hip waders and entered the water to shoot what he saw on shore.

A typical landscape positions the viewer on the bank, observing the water. Ellis says, "When you look at a William Nichols painting, you are in it."

The photographs provided subject matter but not a means to transition them to canvas. The obvious choice was realism, which he rejected as too harsh for the sentiments he wanted to convey.

"I would not be able to capture in any way, shape or form the sensibility I feel about nature, which has a softness and ambiguity and emotion to it," he says.

The technique he developed is a marriage of photorealism with the impressionism and abstraction of his early work. It's more complicated than this, but it involves thinning oil paint and applying it like watercolor. The consistency of the paint allows light to come through, reminiscent of a stained-glass window. Less manageable than undiluted pigment, it enables an amorphous quality to the work. When Nichols wishes to draw the viewer's eye to a particular area of a painting, he makes it sharper or stronger or bulkier.

"When you get up close to one of his paintings, it's abstract," Folliard says. "The further you walk away, the more it becomes super-real."

The Traveler Comes Home

Nichols' work since 1974 has been featured in dozens of solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including the recent "Of Nature" exhibition at Tory Folliard Gallery. His paintings are held in the collections of an international clientele, such as Milwaukee Art Museum; Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida; and Stanford University.

After he retired from teaching, Nichols and his wife of 50-plus years, Sandra, moved about the country for nearly two decades in search of a new permanent home. They tried Florida and Phoenix before returning to the Chicago area about a year ago and happily settling into a 16th floor condominium in a glassy high-rise.

He keeps a pretty tight work schedule, painting for a few hours every morning and afternoon, and he takes off a month or two each year for the couple to travel. At age 80, Nichols doesn't get into the woods to photograph these days, but he has a vast library of images and slides for reference. There's so much more to paint.

"If I have attempted to do anything fresh as a landscape painter, it is that experience of stopping to look at what can be just around us if we take the time to see it," he says.