William Nichols (artist)

William Nichols (born 1942) is an American artist known for highly detailed, tactile landscape paintings that combine physical scale with intimacy. His work depicts unassuming gardens, forests, ponds, and streams rather than grand vistas, in dense, close-up screens of foliage, thicket or water that immerse viewers within the experience rather outside it. Nichols developed his mature style in the 1970s, combining painterly traditions going back to Impressionism with reemerging movements such as Realism and Photorealism; critic John Perreault called his approach, "Photo-Impressionism." He has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including at OK Harris Gallery in New York (1979–2013), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Milwaukee Museum of Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), and Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon); his work belongs to many private and public museum collections. In addition to reviews in national publications, Nichols's work appears in several art historical surveys of Realism and landscape painting, including The Artist and the American Landscape and Contemporary American Realism Since 1960, among others. Critic Mac McCloud observed that Nichols's "meticulous craft and precise observation of shape, edge, color and light" rendered his work "almost beyond reality […] alive with growth and transformation, teeming with insects and sweltering weather and yet, in the eternal aesthetic paradox it is motionless." Gallerist Ivan Karp wrote, "the vital pulse" of Nichols's paintings defies "the conviction that 400 years of depictions of the natural world nullify the ability of living artists to produce landscapes of high consequence."