Nick is a painter and boater based in London and on the 1903 narrow boat ‘The Eileen’ taking a ‘Slow Journey’ around the English canal system…
Painter Nick Holt grew up around the limestone villages, tors, caves and moors of the Derbyshire White Peak. However, for over thirty years he has lived in London, and at times, more peripatetically on a 1903 Birmingham Canal Navigation day boat called ‘The Eileen’ undertaking an extended and very slow journey around the English canal system. Nick could be described as an inventor of landscapes.
“I think painting is all about, and always has been about, synthesis, love, loss and connection.”
Nick makes unruly paintings; layered works that have a tendency to take unexpected turns as he explores memory and sense of place through paint.
“My paintings tend to explore ideas around belonging, longing, identity, memory and loss. They are not works involving resemblance, though they are attached to the natural world.”
Overlain and disrupted by gestural brushstrokes, the paintings are specifically concerned with experience. The inherent logic driving the developing work has nothing to do with representation, and everything to do with a dialogue with the work itself as it is being made.
“The paintings evolve only slowly, emerging from the physical process of painting to the degree that, at the start, I can’t see, and have no wish to see, the end-image, which is arrived at through a combination of wiping-out, painting-over, erasing, turning the canvas around, printing, drawing, blotting, masking, sanding, scrubbing, scraping and scratching…”
The paintings are emotional and aesthetic journeys of exploration. Nick’s work is often concerned simultaneously with psychological ‘inscapes’ and both the intimate and the panoramic aspects of the physical landscape. This results in images in which multiple viewpoints are the norm and natural motifs are aesthetically and emotionally analysed, synthesised and sometimes broken down to the extent that their original identity is wilfully dismantled. All of this is clothed in the veils of memories which are integral to his associative approach to art.
“I want to clamber about in memories and experiences, getting muddy boots and rain on my face. I lean towards what might be described as ‘new natural’, a suggested placescape that may reference a particular time or place but doesn’t strive to reproduce a particular view of it.”
Expressing a singular identity is not his aesthetic or conceptual concern but rather he is interested in how memory and identity in a constant state of becoming. Nick is fascinated by the ways in which we describe and translate our experiences, our stories… He believes painting to be a ‘process of unearthing’.