Salem, OR
About Dave Nichols:
In 1981, my wife, the writer/artist Sloy & I banded together with a pact that with her words & my pictures, we would create a body of work focused on transcendence, not ideas. It remains our calling to this day. I started by drawing & painting the houses, trees, cars & people of the northeast Salem, Oregon neighborhood I've lived in or around most of my life. This place remains a fundamental source of inspiration. Since those 1st days I've expanded my horizons somewhat. We've lived on Camano Island, WA, and in San Diego, driven & camped from Salem to NYC twice taking long ways home, made numerous trips back & forth around the Western US & recorded all in drawings, paintings & words. Almost from the beginning my representations of life started edging toward abstraction. In 1983 I called a color pencil drawing of a chair 'Transporting Furniture to Heaven' because the chair seemed to be dissolving. I was also becoming aware of the importance of line in my work. Usually a few quickly drawn lead pencil lines were the basis of my drawings & paintings, big & small. Those 2 forces, dissolving & line, working on each other have been the crux of everything i've done since & with that, the dialogue between drawing the life around me & the dissolving into, has been almost exclusively non objective work since 2008. To my eyes it reads as 'real'. I'm going to follow this path for awhile yet. The world around me will always be with me.
