Don Nice (1932-2019)

American Artist Don Nice was a ranch hand, football player, outdoorsman and teacher, but always an artist at heart. He had an enduring love for the environment. “I became acquainted with the world,” he says, “from the saddle on a horse or the leather of my boots: slow, steady and in a focused way in which survival could depend on your familiarity with the land.” The American land would remain central to his oeuvre.

Don Nice enlisted in the Army and pursued education through the GI Bill. He was accepted to graduate school at Yale University. He travelled throughout Europe and met other artists learning techniques along his journey. He earned an MFA from Yale and was the Artist in Residence at Dartmouth College.

Nice painted still-lifes of an individual object, and later incorporated a group of objects like emblems or totems. Animals of his beloved Hudson Valley home, became iconic motifs in his work. He removed the background of the still life subject in order to show how the ordinary was extraordinary.

Believing deeply in the interdependence of man and nature, Nice’s landscapes have become earthscapes, blending the natural and the manmade, abstraction and realism, painting and sculpture and movement.

Don Nice’s art is in more than 70 museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the MoMA in NYC.