Layers of Meaning

Icographic Nature - Don Nice

Don Nice is a photorealist painter who has demonstrated amazing staying power in the fickle world of art. His work is included in almost every book on the "new realism" in painting that began to emerge in America in the late 1970s/early 80s. The pieces back then were simple images, often with pop art iconography, candy wrappers or soda cans. Eventually Nice moved into a fascination with nature, a subject he has explored for the past twenty or so years. A clip below from the review by Carter Horseley gives a glimpse into how this process has evolved.

"For a while, Nice produced large "portraits" of animals like buffaloes but it is not until he began his "totems" that his art really begins to resonate. At first, he did vertical "totems," but more recently he has experimented wildly and very effectively with their form, sometimes using a star form and often far more complex forms, sometimes perforated. The "predellas" at first were at the bottom of rectangular pictures, but now often surround the central image and even, in the "spinners," are not always right-side up. Whereas traditional predellas on Renaissance altarpieces were usually different scenes from the subject's life, Nice's predellas are often single animals, like a bird or a squirrel, and while the Renaissance masters were deeply involved with quite specific symbolism of animals and objects that they included in their works, one gathers that Nice does not have a specific iconographic hierarchy and is content to let viewers of his works free-associate."
Images by Don Nice; "Hudson River Series" (top) and "Montana Spinner, 2002"