“I’m shy, to be honest,” says painter Ward Nichols. “I hate coming up and knocking on someone’s door and asking them about a barn or a building, and if I can paint it.
“They say, ‘it doesn’t need painting – it hasn’t been painted in 50 years!’ So then I have to explain.
“It usually turns out well.”
Nichols, the North Carolina artist whose paintings grace our cover and table of contents, was born in the coal mining town of Welch, W.Va. He picked up his first paintbrush at the age of 12.
“As corny as it sounds, my mother gave me an oil painting set for Christmas,” he recalls. He sat down that day at the kitchen table and copied a picture that was on the wall. “It was a terrible painting.” Today, it hangs in his studio.
The work you see here is Nichols’ more realistic, even photorealistic painting, though he also works in contemporary and abstract. “People think of me as being very conservative,” he says, “when actually I’ll take a wild spell sometimes.”
The cover, “Ridge View,” is of a pre-Civil War barn now gone, built at the edge of a ridge.
“This barn has always fascinated me,” Nichols says. After he painted the scene – twice – the last he saw of the barn was on a day when workers were tearing it down. He stopped and asked why.
The floor was rotting, they told him, and a cow had wandered in and gotten caught. She got out again, “but has been walking funny ever since.”
So the barn is gone now, and with it all traces of the slaves who cut the virgin pine lumber to build it, and that precarious, startling edge-of-the-mountain perch that surprised one painter and who knows how many others traveling down that road.
“That happens so often that when I’m out looking for subjects,” says Nichols. “I really feel a sense of urgency, to get it down before they tear it down.
“I always hate to see a barn go – so much attention is paid to old homes, but the barns are really sort of a reflection of the heritage of people who built them.”
The painting on our table of contents page, “Waiting,” is actually two scenes – a barn in Wilkes County, N.C. and a tractor from Forsythe County.
“I had driven by it so often,” says Nichols of the barn, and he finally stopped to knock on the owners’ door.
Many thanks to the gallery Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville, N.C., which opened its doors to us, connected us with Ward Nichols and made his images available to our magazine.
Click here for the Ward Nichols Interview.
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