Paintings of Produce: Don Nice's Early Works

A purveyor of the 20th-century art ethos, filled with a clarity of vision, a sense of curiosity, a love of the natural world, a simplicity of materials, and a realization of his place in the art history of America and abroad, Nice was a true original, linking objects, shapes, and life through his paintings and sculptures. 

As a young man, he was a tough guy and an athlete. He worked as a ranch hand, herded cattle, took art classes, taught at the Art Center School (now the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena), and got a teaching certificate. After the Korean War, Nice volunteered for the draft, taught high school, worked as an illustrator, then took off for Europe—where, of course, he fell in love with Rome and Florence, lingering there for a couple of years.

The show at Craig Starr Gallery takes viewers back to an energetic, playful America jammed with associations, curiosity, and experimentation at play with the classical Pop artists dominating the early to mid-1960s, including Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Jim Rosenquist, Neil Jenney, and not least of all Alex Katz, who remained a formidable influence on Nice with his flatness and forthrightness. 

Equally in the mix were such mid-20th-century figures as Charles Demuth and Stuart Davis. Nice lavished rich, densely colored oil paint on canvas to render cushy-looking produce and rolls reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg. He embedded his works with multicolored oil-painted sprinkles to build and fill his modern realist and abstract images, conveying his singular produce portraits full-on frontal. He avoided perspective and background activity.

Nice once explained, “I didn’t want to paint backgrounds, so I sought out flat frontal images that were articulate without references to time or form.” He continued, “The flattening of space to get the subject outside of time led me to some of Stuart Davis’ compositions and then on to Jasper Johns and his painted maps and flags. I deleted shadows so that the subject could refer to itself… A shadow implies time; it asserts space or form… I just wanted the object, sharp and clear.” Such is a succinct summary of his aims at the time.

As Nice tried to segue away from the exciting allure of Abstract Expressionism, in 1962, he went to study Painting at the Yale School of Art with Josef Albers and alongside such cohorts as Chuck Close, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Robert Mangold, and Nancy Graves. But first, while in Europe and still in his 30s, Nice apprenticed with Oskar Kokoschka, who urged him to focus on painting, not thinking.

What makes Nice hardest to categorize is the breadth of his history and experiences. His father owned a farm in California where Nice studied the scale and colors of advertising images, and he adapted it all into a form of personal Pop. 

The paintings in this show were brought in by Nice’s daughter, Leslie, who gathered the works, mostly documenting labels and ads of the period, from the artist’s estate. Nice will also be the subject of a solo show at the Bridgehampton Museum in September.