Christian Nicholson puts the finishing touches to a portrait of writer David Adams Richards.
In the world of clichés, the phrase, “art imitates life,” is a popular one. But Christian Nicholson doesn’t live in that world – for him, art is life.
The love of his life, he says.
The 61-year-old wakes up every morning in the living room of a downtown apartment where the conventional television and computer have been replaced by an easel and a canvas. Art textbooks line a bookshelf and beside it a stereo plays bluesy folk tunes. Seventeen stained glass lamps dot the room’s landscape. The sun shines through the coloured glass, turning the apartment’s floor into a palette.
Countless portraits, all inscribed with Nicholson’s signature and infused with a myriad of bright colours, sit stacked against white walls. Countless more hang from them. The subjects stare out from their canvasses, un-living, yet startlingly lifelike.
Nicholson wakes up alone in this room every morning surrounded by his painted people.
“I’m often asked how I stand all these people looking at me all the time,” Nicholson says, his eyes shifting from one portrait to another. “But these paintings are my life.”
His life and his livelihood: Nicholson is a portrait painter and has been for the last 40 years. He has painted some of Canada’s most prominent personalities, from authors like Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies, to Ted Roger, CEO of Rogers Communications. His portrait of former governor general Romeo Leblanc will be featured on a commemorative stamp to be released by Canada Post on Feb. 8.
A Nicholson commission can go for up to $30,000 and his works are featured in corporate boardrooms, the parlours of Canada’s elite, and the national portrait collection.
“His work is quite remarkable,” says Angela Carr, a professor of art history at Carleton University. “He brings a sense of life to whoever he paints.”
But for Nicholson, painting portraits was never about accolades or recognition; these were things that just came with the territory of being good.
“I’m just doing what I’ve always wanted to do . . .This was what I was meant to do with my life,” he says.
“Being a portrait painter was my destiny.”
Nicholson’s life as a portrait painter began when he couldn’t find a summer job after his first year of university. At 20 years old, he was bored, unemployed and uninspired. Then fate, in the form of his mother, stepped in.
“She came home and gave me my first paint set and I fell in love,” Nicholson recalls. “After that it was only a matter of time before painting would become a huge part of my life.”
This love of painting led Nicholson to transfer schools and enroll in the fine arts program at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. He was accepted on Sept. 5, 1969, only four days before classes began.
At Mount Allison, Nicholson would hone his craft.
“All thanks to Mr. Pulford,” he says.
Pulford was one of Nicholson’s professors. He would circulate around his students, stopping in front of their canvasses, and always voicing the same complaint.
“I see mauve,” Pulford would say.
Nicholson would scratch his head every time he heard the strange critique but confusion eventually turned to realization for the young painter.
“Professor Pulford was talking about colour,” Nicholson says. “It was about using our imagination and painting colours that weren’t necessarily there.”
Nicholson stands up and walks toward a huge version of his Leblanc portrait that hangs over his bed. The background is a fiery blend of red and orange. The former governor general’s black pants are highlighted with a bright blue and his navy tie with lines of purplish-brown. What had been a solid grey cardigan in real life is painted in green with hints of copper and black. The other portraits that surround him are equally vibrant.
“If you paint people in bold colour, you make them alive. You capture them.”
But in a room full of brightly-painted people, Nicholson is the most colourful.
He sits on a stool in front of his easel, a tray of half-used tubes of oil paints sitting on his lap. This is his perch for hours a day as he paints faces and captures personalities. On the breast pocket of his green plaid shirt is pinned a paper placard of one of his portraits.
“This,” he says as he flicks the placard, “is a little bit of shameless self-promotion…I always have one of my portraits pinned on me.”
It hangs, perhaps not coincidentally, right over his heart.
Beside him is the 1940’s typewriter he uses to send letters offering his work to potential portrait subjects. He has written hundreds of these letters and he has hundreds of responses, including a respectful “no thanks” from Leonard Cohen. All the initial contact Nicholson makes with his potential clients is done through the mail. When he is done painting them, contact usually stops.
Sometimes, though, friendships can emerge, such as when Nicholson completed a portrait of Dr. Marianne Scott, the first female National Librarian of Canada.
“When I first met Christan, we ended up talking for two and a half hours,” recalls Dr. Scott. “He is such an open man and I think that helps him do a good job of capturing people in his portraits.”
The two went from portrait painter and portrait subject to quick friends. Now Nicholson goes over to her house after every Christmas and helps her un-trim her tree.
He says while friendships like this are rare, they are important to his life as an artist.
“It is a strangely lonely thing to be an artist,” Nicholson says. “That loneliness can creep up on you if you don’t do anything to stop it.”
To quash the threat of loneliness in an apartment inhabited by more painted faces than real ones, Nicholson takes on boarders to live in the spare bedroom. The other bedroom is filled with paintings and art supplies; Nicholson sleeps in the living room facing his easel.
“I wake up to my love, I guess,” he laughs.
Nicholson also hires “art assistants,” chatty twenty-somethings who keep him company while he paints his portraits, creating and capturing life on canvas.
It’s not a conventional life, but conventionality isn't always the key to fulfillment.
“I am doing what I love and I am good at it… Not many people can say that they found their destiny.”
And so Nicholson spends his days, filled with real people and painted ones, bright colours and a colourful personality, doing something that makes him happy.
“I always wanted to do portraits,” he says. “When you die, there’s nothing left of you. But if you leave a portrait, something of you always remains; portraits don’t disintegrate like photographs.”
“And because I’ve painted these portraits, I’ll always be around.”