Graham Nickson, an erudite British-born artist known for boldly figurative paintings rendered in lush, saturated colors — and for his influential stewardship of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, the bastion of fine arts in Greenwich Village — died on Jan. 28 at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, Dita Amory, his wife, said.
Mr. Nickson joined the faculty of the New York Studio School as a teacher in 1988 and was named dean in 1989. He retired last year.
The school had been started in a Broadway loft in the early 1960s by the artist Mercedes Matter and a group of disaffected Pratt Institute students in search of an immersive, atelier-like arts education focused on fundamentals like drawing. By the time Mr. Nickson arrived, it occupied an eccentric collection of rowhouses on West Eighth Street that Gertrude Whitney had cobbled together and used as the site of the original Whitney Museum, which she opened in 1930.
That provenance and raffish, bohemian architecture nicely matched the New York Studio School’s anti-corporate ethos: It was an anachronism, and proudly so.
Mr. Nickson joined the ranks of an illustrious group of teachers that had included, over the years, Philip Guston, Louis Finkelstein, Alex Katz and Sidney Geist — and that would later include, as visiting artists, Louise Bourgeois, Christo, Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, Fairfield Porter and Elizabeth Murray.
In his first year at the school, he conceived the Drawing Marathon, a two-week boot camp required for full-time students but also open to the public. With Mr. Nickson as its amiable, indefatigable guru, it became a cultlike pilgrimage for many, despite the eight-hour days and the critiques stretching late into the night, which required enormous stamina. (Other faculty members taught — and continue to teach — marathons, but Mr. Nickson was the one applicants clamored for.)
Over the decades, the marathon has drawn artists and civilians of all ages and walks of life from around the world. It is renowned for its transformational effect on attendees, among them a sous-chef who left his kitchen to study art full time and an architect who became a full-time painter. Whit Conrad, a retired corporate lawyer, came for one session and stayed on for three years, emerging with a serious art practice.
Mr. Conrad recalled Mr. Nickson’s comments after his first semester. “He said, ‘You look like you’re really struggling. It looks like you’re trying to make art. The problem is, your friends will think you’re crazy and serious artists will think it’s crap.’”
Fast-forward to Mr. Conrad’s third year: “Congratulations,” Mr. Nickson told him. “You’ve become a painter.”
For Mr. Nickson, drawing was an essential, foundational act, and a kind of religion.
“It is the most direct means of describing an experience or an idea,” he wrote in a statement on the school’s website. “Drawing is the most crucial pathway to understanding in art, and is the common bond between the disciplines of painting and sculpture.”
Mr. Nickson “emphasized the history of art and the making of art, not the business,” Betty Cuningham, Mr. Nickson’s gallerist, said in an interview. “That’s not always the case. He was such a good painter, and honest professor, because he felt if you were going to be a true artist, you had to immerse yourself in those fundamentals.”
Mr. Nickson’s knowledge of art history was encyclopedic. One of his signature moves in a marathon was to link a student’s drawing to a historical work — a Cézanne, perhaps, or a Picasso or a Titian — and, in a generous act of pedagogy, to explain the connection.
Mr. Nickson’s own large-scale oil paintings feature figures in landscapes, often beaches, against a backdrop of uncanny colors and marvelous light — purple skies, hot-pink clouds, blue mountains, orange sand — faces obscured as they drape an arm over their eyes or turn away from the viewer. He would return to a painting time and again, spending as long as 10 years on a single piece.
The New York Times critic John Russell, reviewing a 1981 show of Mr. Nickson’s work, described his work as “an art of portent.”
“This is not to say that his paintings come with a ready-made symbolism,” Mr. Russell wrote, “but simply that when his people walk downstairs, put up an umbrella or clamber out of an inland sea, they resonate in ways that we cannot easily account for.”
Graham Geoffrey Nickson was born on Aug. 30, 1946, in Knowle Green, a rural village in Lancashire, in the west of England. The youngest of three children of Alice Maud (Smith) Nickson and George Nickson, a commercial artist, he made his first drawings on the endpapers of secondhand books his father brought home.
He attended Camberwell College of Arts in London, graduating in 1969, and earned a master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in 1972.
That year, he won the Rome Prize, the prestigious fellowship that supports artists, scholars and writers working in Italy — and for two years, he doggedly painted every sunrise and sunset in watercolor. It was a transgressive act, Ms. Amory said, because the subject was such a cliché.
This was a practice he followed throughout his life. Determined to capture the dawn of the new millennium on Long Island, he stayed up all night to wait for it. It turned out to be a cloudy day, but he painted it anyway.
“I’m interested in things that are opposites — dichotomies,” he told Hyperallergic magazine in 2014. “Obsession, and what you do with it, is part of that double thing: It is obsessive, but it is good for you. How can you paint bathers for 30 years? How can you paint sunsets for such a long time? Well, you can if you feel that they are still as thrilling and challenging as they were from the first.”
In 1976, Mr. Nickson moved to the United States on a Harkness Fellowship. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, among other institutions. He taught marathons all over the world and began offering them on Zoom during the pandemic.
In addition to Ms. Amory, Mr. Nickson is survived by their daughter, Serena Nickson, a painter; and a sister, Wendy Duxbury.
No two marathons were alike, but Mr. Nickson led his students through some essentials, which largely had to do with exercises — painful ones — to help them jettison their ideas about what drawing meant and how to understand space. He exhorted them to explore the spaces between objects, as hills and valleys to investigate and plumb.
The students worked in charcoal, on enormous sheets of paper, in front of sets constructed of disparate objects — dead tree branches, baskets, bowls, bottles, vegetables, scrunched-up fabric — and live models. In an essay for The New York Times about the marathon she attended in 1998, Sarah Boxer described the day one woman was concentrating so intently on her work that she fell off her ladder, as another student moaned, “Are we just going to be broken down and broken down and broken down?”
For days, Ms. Boxer wrote, Mr. Nickson had instructed the students to cut up their drawings and paste them together in weird configurations. He had them tackle the work again and again, gluing in new sections, filling in new spots, rubbing out others. Ms. Boxer wrote of the day he had them slice two drawings in half and switch the top bits.
“Something happened today that was quite radical,” Mr. Nickson told the group.
What was it? Only one person answered: “We all got suicidal.”
“It should have hurt. It should be meaningful. It’s savagery,” Mr. Nickson said. “What else? Why did we switch the two tops? It gave us new adventures, new possibilities.”
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