Cade Tompkins Projects

Andrew Nixon

Andrew Nixon is inspired by the distinctive light of Brittany, France, both in his vast pastoral  landscapes and his landscapes with figures.  His work captures the quiet and serene feeling of the world either in pure landscape or when the work contains haunting figures imbued with a sense of mystery and a defiant non-relationship with the viewer.  One wonders about the character, mood and reason for the gatherings, taking place around a table laid with a map while other times simply looking out into the land. Animals often join the human landscapes making their presence known – a white whale, a black steed, a black dog.  The surface of the works are lightly textured giving an impression of pointillism.  The subtle sense of color and light heighten the tableaus and render the scenes theatrical and intriguing.

Nixon also finds inspiration from the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. The artist explains that photographs help him to rethink a number of matters that as a painter that he considers important, specifically, American modernity, time, space, technology, and the continuing influence of photographic imagery in our culture. His aim is to incorporate into frames of Muybridge’s images the formal stillness and solidity found in ancient Egyptian relief sculpture, as well as in early Renaissance work by painters such as Fra Angelico and Giotto.  By adapting archaic painting techniques to fixed images of motion, Nixon expresses the inherent contradiction between motion and stillness in new and revealing ways.

Nixon holds degrees from Indiana University’s Hope School of Fine Art and Boston University’s School of Visual Arts. Andrew Nixon is also a recent recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2012).