Tending Time, a new exhibition of garden-inspired paintings by Sag Harbor artist Roy Nicholson opened Saturday at the Alex Ferrone Gallery (25425 Main Road Cutchogue, 631-734-8545), arriving just as the summer season gets underway.
The exhibition presents a selection of Nicholson’s paintings from a series of works called 52 Weeks II, where he created one painting each week for a year, using his garden as a subject and as inspiration.
The oil paintings, created on 24-by-24-inch panels, invite viewers to contemplate vividly colored plants—including peonies, basil, milkweed, asparagus, foxglove, and others—depicted across different seasons and times of day.
According to the gallery notes, “Tending Time moves fluidly between representation and abstraction and explores the fleeting beauty of Nicholson’s Sag Harbor garden through observations of light, weather, plant growth and transformation.”
Gallery director Alex Ferrone says “we are honored to be presenting much of Roy’s 52 Weeks II collection of paintings to our patrons. As visitors move through the gallery, Tending Time invites a slow and contemplative pace, much like strolling through the artist’s garden — wandering familiar paths and noticing details that emerge, bloom, fade, and return to earth. This exhibition encourages viewers to linger with the colors and textures, while reflecting on the passage of seasons and the beauty found in continual change.”
The entire series of 52 paintings was displayed at Dowling College in 2013 and in the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City in 2012-13. (This series is the second time Nicholson created a painting per week for a year — the original series, 52 Weeks, was produced in 1997.)
On Saturday, an artist talk and reception was held in the gallery’s art barn, an event space where Nicholson and his wife Helen Harrison (art historian, journalist and former longtime director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton) spoke; a 25-minute documentary film on Nicholson’s work as an artist, part of Share2Art.com’s Share to Share Project, was shown to a capacity crowd.
Nicholson says of the 52 Weeks II project “Each one was finished Sunday at 12 o’clock, regardless … the discipline of trying to get something finished in a week and then to get to the next round was what I needed.”
Nicholson was born in Cambridge, England, and has exhibited his work internationally and throughout the United States. His work is in many private and public collections, including the Royal College of Heralds, London; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton; Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington and many more. Nicholson is a Professor Emeritus at Long Island University, where he taught full-time from 1986 to 2005.
Nicholson has created a number of public works, including Morning Transit and Evening Transit, two 7 x 33-foot glass mosaics, made for the Long Island Rail Road’s Hicksville station. Nicholson completed two 55-foot-long glass mosaics and a large skywell for the Gold Line Portal at Union Station in Los Angeles, commissioned by Metro Art Los Angeles and installed in 2006, and Hempstead Plain: Morning and Evening, glass panels for the LIRR Hicksville station platform waiting rooms and two stairwell mosaics, were completed in 2020.
Nicholson and Harrison will both be inducted into the Hamptons Artists Hall of Fame, part of the annual Hamptons Fine Art Fair, in July, with Harrison being awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award.
In the Nicholson documentary, he comments that “so far, I think everything is about the natural world for me. My work has always something to do with nature … my reaction to the natural world and how it’s used in my work. And I think one of the struggles … is that when I’m trying to develop a painting, I’m not making a reproduction of the flower. I’m using the natural world in a much more subjective way … I try to find something in it that I can use to create a new piece that just doesn’t exist anywhere before.”
The Alex Ferrone Gallery is open Fridays through Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. or by appointment. Tending Time will be on display until July 26. For more information, check the gallery’s website.
