Nick Blosser was born in 1958 in Columbiana, Ohio. He lives and works as an artist in Johnson City, TN and currently teaches at Milligan College.
What I would like to do in painting from nature is to embrace what is actually in
front of me and simultaneously extract something that cannot be easily seen or described. If this is possible, I would like to think it happens most naturally, simply through the activity of painting. That making a painting of a portion of nature can possibly become its own distinct reality and not simply a representation of nature is an idea I find compelling. I suppose this may be obvious. After all, don’t most representational painters feel they are making something anew when they work with a subject?
A year ago I saw a beautiful exhibit of Giorgio Morandi paintings at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. And even though I am very familiar with his work, I was struck by the idea that someone could paint the same bottles and objects over and over for thirty or forty years and yet not feel they are stuck in a rut. Yet, I realize it is because his subject was not simply bottles and objects but light, color, shape, and the beauty of paint and how it is applied. All of these coalesce to make something that has deep feeling, mystery, and urgency.
With these recent watercolor paintings I have tried to look really hard at what I see but also look within or beneath what I see. It is ongoing.
– Nick Blosser, 2010
