Past: Herald Nix & Roger Brouard: Gilded Splinters

Herald Nix & Roger Brouard: Gilded Splinters. Nix and Brouard embrace the process—the journey as much as the destination. Finding and creating routes, acknowledging missteps along the way, and evidencing them as part of the finished work. They are interested in finding something new within something familiar, as we can often find more within boundaries than without.

Nix (b. 1951) makes daily trips to nearby Shuswap Lake, British Columbia, and uses the familiar landscape as a template for much of his work. Having the broad subject already set allows for the improvisation of oil paint onto his birch panel—an extemporaneous creation within a framework. Brushing, scraping, pushing impasto, and paint thinned out so that it seeps into the wood grain of the panel. Because Nix focuses on what develops on the board in front of him, he takes peripheral inspiration from the lake's air, light, and weather rather than faithfully recording the landscape. It is why his works always look fresh and remarkably never redundant.

On long flights to China, Brouard (b. 1946) would ink ideas for sculpture yet realized. The drawings are quietly mesmerizing—heavy, black sketchy lines, often with wite-out corrections and a keen sense of balance. Brouard is a master carpenter, but for his sculpture, he uses a saw as he uses a pen—his black-painted, cut plywood forms often have splintered edges and putty at the joints, similar to his inked jagged lines and wite-out drawings. His line has a hesitant fluidity—it is not effortlessly smooth—it allows us to see the process.

Nix and Brouard both had professional lives outside of their artistic pursuits. It's not that art came later in life; it was always with them and helped with their professional objectives, Nix as a celebrated musician and Brouard as a carpenter and entrepreneur. It is only now that life has come to their art and has afforded them this time of more sustained focus.

We are honored to pair these artists in their inaugural New York exhibits.