James Nickel (b. 1943), Untitled Painting, Chalk Line Series, 1971, 92" x 50.7"

This is a large-scale painting by James Nickel dated 1971 and part of his early grid, chalkline and spray paint series.

The following is from his website:

Jim Nickel was born in Oak Park, Illinois, November 30, 1943. Nickel earned a B.A. in philosophy and classical languages from Concordia Senior College in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. In 1978, Nickel moved to New York where he earned an M.F.A. in sculpture at Columbia University (1986) and a teaching certificate from Columbia Teachers College. He has been a visiting artist in the New York State school system and continued his work at his Brooklyn studio, rotating among sculpture, painting, and photography. In the summer of 2019, after nearly 40 years on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, Nickel moved his studio to Woodstock, New York. His principal residence remains in New York City.

Artist in Venture:

The Brentwood studio paintings (1970 to 1978) evolved from photographs but exhibit similar structural elements found in the wood sculptures. Canvas formats were usually large (often 8’ x 12’) and were painted flat, stretched across a platform stage. Paint was applied with brush, paint-soaked strings, and spray gun. The “string paintings” had their genesis in carpenter’s chalk line stretched across a surface. Nickel liked the tactile feel of snapping the line and watching the blue chalk diffuse outward from the strong center line. He set the blue lines with fixative, and painted in, over, and around them. Some of these early snap-line paintings made veiled references to traditional landscapes; others moved in a purely geometric direction. He also created approximately ten “tar paintings,” using heavy mixtures of black tar and sand on canvas, shaping texture by pulling strings through and out of the surface. Some strings were left buried in the tar. The overall effect was stunning — a sculptural relief created by transforming common and inexpensive materials into a soft-looking black velour surface.

As the paintings evolved, Nickel painted large shapes as the ground and then stretched cords over the surface, now using the strings as a stencil. He painstakingly masked thousands of small alternate rectangles over the entire surface of the canvas so that the finished painting resulted in a herring-bone texture, and sprayed his own formulated primary color acrylic paint across the canvas. A striking feature of the Brentwood studio was a 55-gallon drum of Rhoplex, an acrylic medium, which was an expensive indulgence at the time. A large “X” is noticeable in the ground of the 1974 painting purchased by the St. Louis Art Museum, left. From a distance the canvas looks like a tapestry. The hard-edge parallel lines appear to bulge optically where they cross. String-stenciled strata of red-yellow-blue blended lines appear to glow with internal warmth, contradicting the cool objective geometry of the design. From 1970 to 1978 Nickel produced approximately 60 paintings in a variety of size formats using this labor-intensive technique. Each painting explored the distance between the obscuring frontal grid system and the colored field. At one moment the eye is becalmed by the pattern; the next moment it is bestirred by the random directions of parallel lines bulging in an optical illusion.