Nicholas Coley


Nicholas Coley
Oil on Canvas

Nicholas Coley, born in 1971 in Connecticut and raised in Muir Beach, California, embarked on an adventurous journey after high school, hitchhiking across the United States. His quest for artistic growth led him to Europe, where he honed his skills at L’ecole des Beaux-Arts in Aix-en-Provence and the Marchutz School in Le Tholonet, France. Seeking spiritual depth, Coley spent a year in a Buddhist monastery near Bordeaux, immersing himself in meditation and contemplation. However, inspired by Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Capricorn, he realized his true calling lay in a more creative and unrestrained life. This epiphany took him to Prague, where he spent a year creating and selling paintings on the Charles Bridge. Coley’s wanderlust continued with a transformative journey via the Trans-Siberian Railroad, traversing Russia and delving deep into China, then returning to the U.S to continue his art practice.

Coley’s distinct artistic style is characterized by his generous use of paint on canvases, embracing a range of bold, striking colors. His paintings are brought to life through vigorous brushstrokes and skilled palette knife work, creating vivid displays of hues, rich tactile texture, and lively, dynamic expressions. His commitment to observing and depicting nature’s transient beauty in various lights and colors is central to his artistry. Over two decades, Coley has dedicated himself to painting full-time, resulting in numerous solo and group exhibitions. His artworks are featured in institutional, corporate, and private collections throughout the United States.

His remarkable success has enabled him to lead a comfortable life in Marin County with his wife and three children. Reflecting on his career, Coley shares, “I just love to paint and discover. Each day brings its own set of triumphs and challenges as I explore color and the emotions it can evoke.”

Artist Statement

My painting has its roots in the fanatical ethos of a small school in the South of France, which made Cezanne its figurehead and had a very black and white view of art history. L’ecole Marchutz was a great place to get rooted in a concrete perspective of the fundamentals and a format of painting from real life. Twenty years later, I still paint on location, finding myself in relation to a place and seeking unity with my surroundings. Only now I’ve exchanged the south of France for the open-air nut house that is San Francisco.

Coming home to the states and studying art was an ambiguous affair, where pluralism and general creativity replaced the achievements of a rooted tradition. Influences such as Wolf Kahn and other Bay Area figures allowed color theory to take a back seat to a generally looser love of all color and made more of a proclamation with bold brushwork and gestural lines. I looked for compositions with energy and tried to impress the immediacy and rush of painting beside major thoroughfares and in parking lots.

More recently the matter of composition has played a prevalent role in my work, as I experiment with less conventional dynamics to arrange the urban and natural environments. For example, in my Market & Pearl Street series, I use the empty asphalt of the street to create a sparse and uncluttered majority of the canvas and forcing detail and subject matter to the periphery. Along the edge I use the darkened, unresolved negative space of a row of cars as its own color field, creating reductive and raw elements of form and a chance to interpret color as broad fields, which unifies for a spontaneous, perceptual painting as one might see if blinded by sun.

I see no end to the possibilities of painting out in the world. Just stand there long enough until the light shimmers off the pavement, or until you see the comforting pattern of parking meters, the side view mirrors, the shadows under cars. If you love nature enough, you will see it even here, in our urban world.