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Lawrence Nickle, the eldest of three children, was born in 1931 in Toronto. He was raised in Toronto, where he attended public school at William Burgess and secondary school at East York Collegiate.At the age of eighteen, he took extension classes at the Ontario College of Art (now the Ontario College of Art and Design), where he studied first under Frederic Chalner, and then John Alfsen. George Pepper, the head of the drawing and painting department at the time, gave Nickle permission to return full time, and offered him the opportunity to design his own schedule in the drawing and painting department. He studied primarily under John Alfsen, and also with Roly Murphy and George Pepper.
He married Olga Edith Paul in 1953, and Roberta Winifred Haviland in 1975. He has a son with each of these former partners.
He has taken painting trips to Kenora Dryden; London, England; Worcestershire, England; Timmins; Porcupine District; Temagami Forest; Michipcocen Township Lake Superior; and Parry Sound District (Georgian Bay and Algonquin). He has lived in all of these places.
In 1977, he moved to the Burk's Falls area with and in 1998, he moved into Burk's Falls proper.
Solo exhibitions of his work include annual exhibitions at Branksome Hall (Toronto) for more than twenty years, an exhibition at the Universidad Autonoma de Chihuahua (2000), Romantic North (W. K. P. Kennedy Gallery, 2003).
(The biographical information featured here was written in consultation with the artist in 2006.)
Interview:
Lawrence Nickle probably had a twinkle in his eye when he was telling this story over the phone: shortly after being potty trained, he made a drawing with squiggly lines for his dad. His proud father congratulated him on the drawing, and asked him what it was. Drawing inspiration from what surrounded him, Lawrence had captured a bowel movement on paper.
Although Lawrence drew a great deal as a child, as he entered his adolescent years, he came to think of art making as something one did on the week-end as a hobby. However, after impressing his neighbourhood mentor with a painting he had made in a lovelorn state at age 19 of the edge of a frozen creek with emerging tree roots, he realized that art could be central to his life. "It was something like being swept along," he says.
The landscape would become a significant part of his work, and in fact, his mentor "was doctrinaire about painting outdoors".
He moved to Lake Superior with his then wife and says, "I'd never seen such exciting land." He sold small landscape paintings to tourists for $15 to $25.
The northern landscape has been a favourite among painters, but Lawrence notes that some have treated the process of representing it like an expedition. "It's worth getting to where your work is," he says, because living in a place and visiting a place are worlds apart. He does enjoy taking trips to paint unfamiliar areas, as "there might be a higher sense of excitement."
Lawrence's primary goal is to express the subject rather than produce a work that is a form of self-expression. "Hopefully when the thing is done, someone will like it and take it away...I only have to find that one person to like that painting. After that, the relationship is between the painting and that person." Hopefully, he says, the owner will "live a wee bit richer because of the connection." He aims to "be transparent when the thing is done" and that he "will be out of the loop."
When asked how his work has changed over time, Lawrence says, "I hope it's paying more attention to the subject and less to the mannerisms producing a recognizable body of work." He adds, "I'm old now. I've got a limited number of years. I'm going to try to do better."
(By Heather Saunders, based on an interview in December, 2006).
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Lawrence Nickle2006
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Lawrence Nickle, painting en pleine air2006
Credits:Liz Lott
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Lawrence Nickle, Correspondence with W. K. P. Kennedy Gallery26 December 2002
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