Patrick Nicholas (born 1968, Sydney) is an emerging landscape painter who seeks to capture in oils the blurred luminescence and ephemeral weather conditions of coastal and desert locales he has visited over the past 15 years. Nicholas received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of New South Wales in 1995 and has been a practicing architect for 30 years. He is currently Director of AN+A, a leading architecture firm in Surry Hills, which he founded in 2012.
A keen observer, Nicholas learned to draw by hand as a child and has maintained a vigorous drawing practice throughout his professional life. While studying architecture, he worked for Frew Publications, producing numerous covers and artwork in ink for The Phantom comic book series. He has been painting in watercolour, acrylic and oils since 2010.
Nicholas’s choice and treatment of colour are informed by the way the American-born architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marian Mahoney Griffin employed colour internally in the sandstone houses they designed in Sydney’s Castlecrag in the 1920s. His approach to colour is also influenced by the rich chromatic compositions on planar surfaces of Mexican modernist architect Luis Barragan. Nominating the tonal landscapes of Giorgio Morandi, Clarice Beckett and Lloyd Rees as touchstones, Nicholas is also inspired by Pierre Bonnard’s bold use of colour.
He begins each painting by applying a Naples yellow ground to a plywood panel and working with the surface grain to trace an organic field of contour lines. From this ground, the conceptual framework is built. As paint is applied, visual information is dissolved by overlapping glazes, colour and form coalesce. Alternating between brushwork and mark-making with a palette knife, Nicholas builds up layers then scrapes them back to the ground to achieve a feathering of atmosphere. “In expressing these moments, I’m thinking about the transparency of glass and the reflectivity of light on different surfaces,” he says. “I’m aiming for loosely painted impermanence, in which elements dissolve in a glittering field of light.”
Nicholas has benefited from mentorships from the late Guy Warren (1921-2024) and Sokquon Tran (born 1969). He also attended an intensive painting workshop with Idris Murphy (born 1949) at Currawong in Pittwater in 2024.
Painting from memory and from life, Nicholas alludes to multiple subjects in a single work. “I am always searching for harmony within a composition of unstable surfaces – the stillness of planes,” he says.
Contact: pat@anplusa.com
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