Tivyside | Archive | 2005 | November | 8
From the archive, first published Tuesday 8th Nov 2005.
An exhibition by Philip Nicol the well known Welsh painter and director of BayArt Gallery in Cardiff, is running at Oriel Mwldan.
The eerie quality of his cityscapes in which he makes significant use of light and shadow can sometimes be likened to the paintings of Edward Hopper, Giorgio Morandi and Giorgio de Chirico. His paintings are densely concentrated and jewel-like.
Nicol makes luminous paintings of urban spaces in which the ordinary and the commonplace is transformed into the extraordinary. Somewhat dreamlike and metaphysical in character, these works present a very particular `take' on the world we inhabit and feel we know.
The paintings are about city life yet many of them completely dispense with the human figure, as they are interested less in the particular stories of individuals, than in the form of collective life that the city enforces through the spaces it makes available. Because the paintings are unpopulated, the viewer's attention must concentrate on the unseen figure of the artist.
Many of the paintings have a pastoral quality to them, and a slowness and quietness that one would think is at odds with the urban environment. But this feature of Philip Nicol's paintings suggests that within the urban environment, the pastoral survives as a state of mind that transforms elements such as a clutch of trees lit by street lamps into comforting emblems of a different kind of life, dreamt up by city dwellers to escape the reality of their surroundings.
Based in Cardiff, Philip Nicol won the Gold Medal in Fine Art at the National Eisteddfod in 2002. This exhibition is a selection of works originally shown at Newport Museum and Art Gallery in January 2005.
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