Dale Nichols- Company for Supper
Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.
― Mary Oliver
Several things to do this morning so I wasn’t planning on writing. But the looking at the light snow that has covered the ground and all the trees here at the studio put me in a mind to want to look at some of the snow paintings of Dale Nichols that I have featured here in the past. Whenever I come across them, I sense a form of completeness in them that I find very satisfying. Maybe it’s because it represents a quality that I seek in my own work. I don’t know but it is always there. Worth looking at this post from a few years back as the snow lightly falls this morning.
Most likely prompted by the recent weather here as well as a desire to try a slight change of palette, I have been doing a small group of snow paintings recently. I thought I would look at several other artists, especially those with a distinct personal style, to see how they handle snow in their work. One of the artists whose snow works really stuck out was Dale Nichols, who was born in Nebraska in 1904 and died in Sedona, AZ in 1995. He is considered one of the American Regionalists, that loosely defined group of primarily landscape painters whose work for which I have long expressed my admiration.
His biography is a bit sparse and there isn’t a lot written about him, but Nichols lived a long and productive life, serving as an illustrator, a college professor and the Art Editor of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. He also spent a lot of time in Guatemala which resulted in a group of work with Meso-American forms that is quite different from his Regionalist work and more than likely influenced the color palette of his normal work as well.
But Nichols is primarily known for his rural snow scenes and it’s easy to see why. The colors are pure and vivid. The snow, put on in multiple glazed layers with watercolor brushes has a luminous beauty. The stylized treatment of the crowns of the bare trees adds a new geometry to the paintings. There is a pleasant warmth, a nostalgic and slightly sentimental glow, to this work even though they are scenes that depict frigid winters on the plains of Nebraska. Free of all angst, they’re just plain and simple gems.
You can see a bit more of Dale Nichols other work on a site devoted to him by clicking here.
Redtree Times 
Absolutely beautiful. Paintings like this can make me miss snow, terribly. I grew up among scenes like this, and remember them fondly. Apparently the human memory can be very selective, because the beauty comes to mind first, long before the shoveling, windshield scraping, frozen door locks, heavy layers of clothing, and so on.
Yes, sometimes during those especially harsh winters, along about mid-February, the sheer chore of enduring winter can get pretty old. But if one can somehow find the beauty in that struggle, the rewards– the stillness where you can hear snowflakes hitting the ground, for example– outweigh the toil.