nick glade-wright — thoughts and other colours

The canvases of Nick Glade-Wright explode with colour, enveloping his landscapes with powerful emotion. He does this to perfection in new abstracts unveiled in Thoughts and Other Colours.

Nick held his first solo exhibition fifty years ago, and over the decades colour has always played a starring role in his paintings. “It is a force with the power to heal and give hope. Colour tells us so much about our lives, the environment and our interactions with the world at large,” Nick muses. Recently orange, ringing with symbolic alarm bells, has been a recurring theme. But in Thoughts and Other Colours optimistic pink and magenta move to the fore.

Feast on Cathedral for a celebration of colour. Lushly applied oils in rich jewel tones, intersected with slashes of black, conjure visions of “stained-glass windows, just like those found in vaulted gothic cathedrals.” Surprisingly, inspiration flowed from a walk in the bush where “fractured shards of sunlight through trees created the abstract shapes seen in a stained-glass window.”

Nick’s intuitive paintings are beautiful, but they also make important statements about our world, “from global warming to the endless conflicts that cause catastrophic numbers of displaced people.” In Arrival the Journey Begins, we are moved by the emotional transition of Iranian political refugee Arad Arta Nik who finds himself on strange Tasmanian shores. A dark foreboding landscape looms over a small boat crowded with refugees, while Arad emerges ghost-like in delicate pink “the colour of vulnerability.”

Nick Glade-Wright’s Thoughts and Other Colours Exhibition runs from January 5 – 22.