That art Thou: The paintings of Nicholas May
by Christopher Bucklow
The sensuous melding of liquid into liquid is a quality that Nicholas May has courted in almost all his work. He clearly holds fluidity in high regard. Similarly he values intensity. Rarely since the fifteenth century have we seen the lapis lazuli of the Madonna’s set against cardinal scarlets and the glint of precious metals. In high esteem he also holds complexity. His fluids are held in a moment in which they intermingle like weather systems - the areas of colour still distinct, but in dynamic interaction - caught before the equilibrium of entropic grey had time to begin to dull the mix of hues.
In terms of form, the modes Nicholas May prefers are of two kinds - either he uses a self-contained shape suspended in a high-key colour field, or the form is unfolded out from its containment - almost spilt out - to occupy the whole canvas as a field of energetic visual incident.
I believe all these qualities to be personal metaphors - either of mind or of the mind-body system. Despite his reliance on the physics of his materials as the proximate agent of his design, for me there is no accident here. The qualities he prizes in his work are the qualities of being he courts. In this we might see them as self-symbols - representations of a mind - but it is unclear whether they reflect an actual inner state or a wished for ideal. In any case they appear as equivalents for their creator . In this sense they are self-portraits. But I suspect Nicholas May’s experience of the self is highly expanded from any narrow view of the ego. My guess would be that the dark self-contained forms of his early work represent a wonder at the rich unknowable interior of his psyche; one that is so much greater than the area of consciousness we tend to habitually think of as our selves.
His early self-contained forms seem to reflect a desire to hold himself together within a liminal envelope. Such a feeling would seem to reflect a wonder at the singularity of being. But his expanded all over fields indicate a counter urge - the desire to melt that individuality of being into an field of limitlessness.
Within the arts, after the beginning of Romantic-modernism in the late Eighteenth century, what you do is what you are. Your work is paradigmatic of your self - its moral and philosophical values. The quadrangle of the canvas becomes a symbolic arena in which the rules of engagement one invents for oneself in the use of materials are a paradigm - in microcosm - the artist’s view of human nature and of what the ideal of the human should be. All the actions and choices made within that rectangle become symbolic of the self.
Allowing the paint to more or less create its own internal forms, as he has done in most of his work, must indicate a distrust of the narrow vision of ego-conscious self and a trust in something vaster than that limited self could achieve in the determination of the image. What is new in this recent work is that touch has returned to a much greater degree. The forms we now see are disposed by the presence of the artist’s hand - much in the way a marbler might work. We would have to suspect that a new balance between the unconscious and the conscious has been forged.
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