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.

Text by Max Lakin.

Biography

Nicholas Bierk (b. 1985 Peterborough, ON) paints transitional moments, everyday scenes, and ethereal landscapes, creating psychologically charged and emotive works. Bierk studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Bierk lives and works in Toronto and has exhibited work in Canada, the United States, and Europe, including exhibitions at Katharine Mulherin Gallery, Cassandra Cassandra, Clint Roenisch and Patel Brown. He is the son of Canadian painter David Bierk and brother to Jeff, Alex, and Charles, also artists.