The works of Frank Cardozo Nicholas (1922′003), an accomplished fine artist who spent his last 30 years living and painting on Cape Cod, will be on exhibition in “Men and the Sea,” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art through November 27. This is the first solo museum exhibit of Nicholas’s work.
“Men and the Sea,” comprising 30 oil paintings including large works, is a series drawn from the artist’s closely researched Narrative Impressions cycle. Painted between 1955 and 1998, with most works created in the 1980s in his sky-lit West Barnstable studio, the series focuses on the fishermen who sailed the North Atlantic waters from Newfoundland to Long Island in wooden schooners at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Nicholas took advantage of the local Cape seashore to observe, photograph and reflect on the ocean’s tremendous power, as well as the interplay of light and water.
“The North Atlantic is and has always been feared and respected for its temperament, treachery and power, and the men who sailed and fished these waters are the emphasis and concentration of this series,” Nicholas said.
An African American native of Washington D.C., Frank Cardozo Nicholas honed his skill as a commercial artist, working as a freelance illustrator, graphic designer and art director in New York City for more than 20 years. He had been widely published by 1970 when he relocated to Cape Cod, where he eventually accomplished his goal of being a full-time fine artist and began to produce his Narrative Impressions paintings.
He developed a fluid style that wove the classic with the contemporary, conveying a sense of richly layered and dramatic dimensionality. In the 1940s, Cardozo studied at Pratt Institute, the Brooklyn Museum School, the Art Students League and the Pennsylvania Museum School of Art.
Nicholas was an early supporter in the founding years of the Cape Cod Museum of Art and is represented in the museum’s permanent collection, as well as in private and corporate collections.
The Cape Cod Museum of Art is at 60 Hope Lane. For more information, 508-385-4477 or www.ccmoa.org .
