Exhibited
I’m Just Like You, UTA Artist Space, New York, June 3-July 1, 2022

The Backstory
Though not a traditional portrait, this work is named after the influential curator and collector Arthur Lewis, who visited Nicholas at his studio in 2022 around the time of its creation. Highly attuned to his process and the feeling in his hands as he works, Nicholas became intrigued by the smoothness of the surface of the painter’s tape compared to the roughness of canvas. This work features Nicholas’ trademark scrawled circles, but the green background is not what it seems; it is made of layers of painter’s tape, which have been fixed to the canvas with archival glue, creating subtle vertical lines beneath the organic mass of circles. This “not what it seems” quality follows in the name of the work, reflecting a relationship between patron and artist in which each has discovered unexpected layers and beauty in the other.