Collection: Nickerson, Duane

Duane Nickerson is an award-winning, internationally recognized Canadian artist who lives and works in rural Nova Scotia. Born in 1965 in Fredericton, New Brunswick, he earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Calgary in 1991 and the same year was awarded the Governor General's Gold Medal Award for Graduate Study. Nickerson has travelled extensively, including a 7 year sojourn in Borneo. His paintings reside in public and private collections in Australia, Brunei, Canada, France, Korea, Mexico, Singapore, the UK and the United States. 

Artist Statement

My recent paintings and drawings reference the Western tradition of landscape painting that begins with Albrecht Dürer in the 15th Century. Images of the land upon which we walk have a long lineage that spans Northern Baroque, English Romanticism , French Realism and 20th Century modernism. In this anxious age of environmental degradation leading to potential ecosystem collapse, the canon of landscape painting has a distinctive relevance. The severity of the environmental crisis calls for a profound reassertion of the presence of natural forms in art. I believe that the healing capacity of the natural world is not fully understood. On an individual level, I find that spending time walking among trees in the forest changes my awareness of the world and my place within this impossibly complex reality we call consciousness. I feel an emotional bond with the visual matrix that unfolds in the forest, but the smell, the feeling of the complex textures, the sound of the wind in the trees creates a fully immersive event that at times is overwhelming. When I return to the studio and plunge myself into the physical process of painting, the richness of the paint, the colours, the smell of the oil; these things facilitate a similar immersive experience in which the process of painting engulfs the scope of my awareness. There is this deep link made in my mind between the sense of the forest, the imagery I am painting and the physical materials I am manipulating. When I break this link and look at my images objectively, I sense that I have literally modelled in paint the visual matrix of the myriad organisms that work together to make up the living forest. My paintings aspire to evoke quiet meditations on transformation through the close study of natural forms. In an age dominated by science and technology, I have purposely chosen to explore the visual potential of trees and uninhabited landscape. Like so many artists before me, including many Canadian landscape artists such as Emily Carr and Tom Thomson, I believe that the close study of natural forms through the medium of painting can evoke renewed sensitivity to the complexity of our natural world. Through probing such meaning, I aspire to draw the viewer’s attention to the imperatives of the natural world and thereby perhaps heighten sensitivity to the fragility and beauty of our natural world. 

Another concept I am forever intrigued by is the contrast between man made time and the sense of endless time experienced in nature. The former exemplifies segmented time, while the latter allows for a seamless sense of time that flows from one moment to the next. I find myself continually striving to translate this easy flow in my work. The joy and solace I experience in nature, is core to all work produced.