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. PHILIP NICOL
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"Night Out I", 2004
acrylic on canvas
150x160cm
"Back Wall", 2004
oil on linen
30x36cm
"Turn", 2001
acrylic on panel
16x18cm(1&3=artist's collections; 2=private collection)
Phil was born in 1953 in Caerphilly, South Wales. From 1972 to 1976 he studied Fine Art at Cardiff College of Art. He has his studio in Cardiff Bay and is a member of the 56 Group Wales since 1984. He is also the director of the BayArt Gallery.
Artist's Statement: "My work is representational. It has been concerned with various issues from eroticism to still life and urban aesthetics of impersonality and emptiness.
I am now in a position in which I believe painting is primarily a source of pleasure before anything else, and it is only through pleasure experienced in painting that makes possible any questions regarding form or subject. Formality still engages me but it is now used as a means of engaging with and expressing something about the world. Life informs art, art feeds other art but art also colours life. I am interested in that circular allusive condition between its experience and its understanding through fiction. My experience of both seeing and making is full of such ghosts and reverberations: the detective novel, photography, other painting and most importantly, film noir and the cinema in general. The landscapes or urbanscapes I paint are, I hope, delightful as well as disquieting and anxious. The viewer is definately the only human presence. You consequently become aware of yourself."
Teaching Experience: 1979-82 lecturer at South Glam.Inst.of Higher Education; 1983-84 lecturer at Limerick School of Art/Ireland; 1984-1997 part time lecturer at various institutions from Liverpool to Newport/Gwent; presently lecturer in Fine Art at University of Wales Institute Cardiff.
Awards: 1997/8 purchase prize University of Glamorgan; 1999 artist's bursary from the Arts Council of Wales; 2001 gold medal for fine art at the National Eisteddfod.
Commissions: numerous
International Links:
academia abroad=1984 residency at the Kunststiftung in Stuttgart/Germany
exhibitions abroad=1981 Cardiff Artists at the Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart/Germany; 1991 touring exhibition with the 56 Group in Czechoslovakia; 1999 in Berlin/Germany; 2002 at Vilnius/Lithuania; 2003 at the Wales European Centre in Brussels/Belgium.
