A Snow Scene by Dale Nichols
A MONA Moment |
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When I first viewed a Dale Nichols painting, I must confess to thinking, what's the big deal here? It seemed, perhaps, too simple. When I see the work of Dale Nichols now, I think of music, and specifically, the music of Aaron Copland. Is it subject matter? Perhaps. Their mutual preoccupation with the common man and woman, the textures of their lives, a feeling of reverence for the landscape. The lyric beauty of Copland's melodies find their visual counterpoint in Nichol's sure and elegant shaping of barns, homesteads and people in the landscape.
Nichols was born in David City, Nebraska in 1904. He received formal training in art at Chicago's academy of Fine Arts. While he spent most of his life outside of Nebraska, his reputation as an artist rests primarily on his work depicting farm life in the Nebraska he experienced as a youth. He stated, "I feel that an artist paints what he has been exposed to during his youth. I think my memory paintings of my home state may be my only creations that I sign with full confidence."
The shapes and compositions of his paintings take their cue from nature. We see broad planes of flat, rectangular color comprising sky and land, interspersed with natural, simplified forms of barns and farm houses. Calm and composed, there is comfort in the design of a classic Nichols painting. The colors are not many or flamboyant, but they are vivid, deep, and iconically suggestive of the light, the color, the feeling of the rural landscape at a certain time of day. Above all, they are skilled exercises in pure design.
In the Museum of Nebraska Art's untitled snow scene by Nichols, the top one third of the painting is a dark, blue/black, horizontal layer of low lying clouds. Those of us who live on the plains are very familiar with these brooding expanses of dense, low lying clouds close to the horizon. Just below, light floods over the landscape in long, horizontal shafts. The horizon level sky is grayish yellow, a straight horizontal line dividing the deep blue cloud bank from the gray, evening light below at dusk. A blue conical tree juts up from the landscape dividing the picture in two. It is a blue, abstracted, piece of formal design, its limbs vertical rivers of black seemingly pulling blue into the snow covered land below.
From left to right the homestead, an outbuilding for cattle feed, and a barn occupy the middleground in a perfect harmony of shapes and rhythm. A snow drift in the foreground follows the curve of the country road to the mailbox. In the grip of winter's stillness, stripped to the bare essentials, there is elegance. Spare tribute to the rural ideal, we are in repose here, our moments full of nothing but the crisp glimmer of suggestion in this quiet landscape. It is our brief association with grace, this delicate clamor of the affinities between things.
