STATEMENT OF WORK

Within Nicholas Bierk's paintings are wanderings that span across glowing landscapes, resting bodies, and shadows lingering on walls. Nicholas Bierk considers them sketches — each compact canvas like a page in a journal — rendering itinerant, painterly explorations that move from place to place, from time to time, dispersed to dissolve any concise narrative or chronology. Bierk is the wanderer, slipping into his far and near past, gathering images while he goes.

In his recent body of work,  Bierk’s precise landscapes erode to embrace softer explorations of light and shadow. Veiled in dark broadcasts, a vagueness sets in that compels the senses to rise, creating psychologically charged and emotive works. Warm windows and horizons, obscured in darkness, shine from afar. Such places are felt more than they are seen. For Bierk, this ambiguity speaks to the intangible and enduring experience of grief, its harsh contours smoothed overtime. Like the outlines of a mountain that one returns to again and again — its shape is known, its details familiar, known so well it’s as if it’s within you while still far away —yet each transition of light to dark will effect and envelop it differently, speaking to broader cycles of time, love, and relationships both in loss and in remembrance. 

A sense of ephemerality hovers over all the works. The moon will soon be covered by passing clouds; a candle will be blown out; a cat will jump; and the sun will set. Yet such transitionary moments are fused with stabilizing forces of patterns and rhythms that are rooted in nature, relationships, as well as in the act of painting. Bierk approaches them with reverence, here depicted as a glowing spider in its minutely woven web, the vast repeated rippling of water, and the steady breath of someone sleeping. Reaching towards an ever distant light is like an act of seeking, along which things will always be found, intended or not. In Nicholas Bierk’s A Distant Light there is solace in that distance and joy in what is gathered along the way.

— Clara May Puton

Nicholas Bierk is good at finding the light in the distance. Sometimes that’s a neighbor’s bedroom illuminated from across a yard, a warm honeyed glow cut into the inky blue-black; or the low winter sun setting over the river, a golden aura grafted onto the water’s surface. Other times it’s an oncoming train, its lights the perfect combination of panic and relief; or a blazing sun looked at straight on, the way your parents told you not to and so of course you do it anyway, a searing orb imprinting itself on your field of vision long after you’ve looked away. 

Nick’s paintings are small but no less potent for it. They’re like portals, intimacy and mundanity mixing into the slurry of memory and finding their way back to the present. Maybe that accounts for their softness, all the edges fuzzing out a bit, eased by time. They pull in a wide view: a porcelain milk jug, stolid and still; a portrait of his partner, asleep, tender. Landscapes draped in dusky silence, a shotgun house caked in snow—these are pictures more of mood than representation of any place visitable. Nick is interested in these intermediary zones, the threshold spaces between outside and in, the moment when the last gasp of the night becomes the breach of the next morning. The shaky promise contained in that moment.

This is Nick working fast, producing an image within a single sitting, maybe two. Snatches of memory, committed to the canvas before they flit away again—the freedom of the small and quick. He allows the failure to come: a lot of them didn’t work out. But a lot of them do. Together they form a kind of open-ended narrative, an accumulative effect, which is, after all, how life works.

- Max Lakin.