Herald Nix: Paintings

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of 41 intimate landscape paintings by Canadian artist Herald Nix.

Herald Nix has returned to paint the same landforms over the course of three years, resulting in this series of intimate oil paintings on wood panel. Nix interprets the shifting light and mood materially, forming a rhythm of repeated motifs revealing change and the interrelationship between season, weather, and the person. With each panel, the artist approaches the topic anew, questioning and exploring, moving between content and paint, creating a space for the viewer to enter and contemplate. Recurring landforms first compel attention; the land seems distant, set apart from artist and viewer. Upon closer inspection, a gap forms where painterly gesture, carved lines, and scraped surfaces develop controlled, corrected iterations of an act allowing the viewer in to wander within his spontaneous painting process.

Nix’s approach to painting is to explore beauty without irony. He seeks this beauty repeatedly, a subject within reach, in the movement of paint, the interaction of line and texture, fluid form, and emotive color. Rather than allowing his choices to be dictated by nature, the act of painting becomes the focus, and he pursues the abstraction of color and paint in an experiment of discovery within the familiar. Painting the same thing again and again, he and his relationship with it are ever evolving.