artist list

Rural Choir watercolor on paper 24 X 18 1/2

Artist Biography:

Gordon Nicholson, a native of Toronto, is a Canadian and American trained architect with two AIA SC Robert Mills Residential Design Merit Awards for 2007 as well as being a Grace Memorial Bridge Design Competition Co-Winner in spring 2006 and a Grand Award 2006 recipient from Remodeling Magazine. He lives with his wife and child in Charleston. His work was included in the fall of 2007 in an event called “Reconciling Poetics and Ethics in Architecture,” at McGill University, Canada with a paper titled Silent Space and the group show titled 70 Architects.

Nicholson’s hauntingly beautiful watercolors with ink on paper appeared in Batture, the LSU School of Architecture Journal in an article in 2004 entitled Present Imperfect (cowriter Alice Guess) that described his thoughts relative to his paintings and the South.

Gordon Nicholson

Charleston

Gordon Nicholson's work is represented at:

Corrigan Gallery

About the Work:

All of the work represents sites in a state of transformation… the images can be divided up into three subjects of study---the ruin, the machine, and light. Exploring ruins induces self-conscious reflections of our body and its temporality. The paintings of broken mechanical machines represent a curious tension between subject matter and aspects of the artistic process. The departure of each work is a digital image captured effortlessly by an electronic device. Then the instantaneous ease of the initial step is reinvested with physicality by the labors of the hand – drawing, painting, and writing. In some ways that initial tension may be symptomatic of our present condition of increasingly mediated experience through electronic devices.

If there is anything besides the direct formal and compositional aspects that can translate into a discussion of “critical regionalism” and architecture, it lies in the exploration itself. In order to be critical we must let go of preciousness and make that mark across the picture. We must invest it with our collective memory and our thoughts. In the retelling, these forms, materials, and circumstances point to an essential quality, which is recognizable to all, an imperfect narrative to combat the perfected façade.