About

Nicolas Young was born in Surrey in 1952, but moved to Exeter two years later. Educated in Devon, he left in 1970 with an Art A level and headed for London. Although he spent the next twenty or so years playing and recording in the world of bands, in between jobs of all kinds, he tried to keep painting from time to time. He took part in some exhibitions at the Camden Gallery in London in the 1970’s. After his marriage break up in Brighton in 1993, he tried to get back to painting more often, and in 1998 won the Sussex Open Individual Artist Category Prize. This was a very encouraging step, as over 1,500 artists, with some well established, and of great talent, had entered works for the exhibition that year. In the words of the judges, his paintings were the "least derivative".

Since moving to Plymouth he has so far had some encouragement from the Somerville Gallery. Nicolas Young doesn’t mind being seen as an "Abstract Expressionist", since he has always admired the many artists that might fit under that banner. He is, however, always interested in the tensions between chaos and order, flatness and depth, and technique and experimentation.

The basic ideas for the paintings are sometimes drawn first, before the experimentation takes place, although he often has the ideas for colours already in his mind. He is also interested in the relationship between organic matter and mechanical creativity, as the world itself is a place where the efforts of mankind are played out against the backdrop of nature. Sometimes, after working on a painting for some time, a new idea will suddenly come into mind, and this makes the process exciting.

The paintings often seem to be part of something bigger, and in recent years he has been instigating a circle at the centre, as the circle has all kinds of references to the world, such as life and death, and eternity. The surrealist idea of subconscious influences also sometimes plays a part. Some recent works have small grey figures in them, loosely based on the shapes of his daughters; the control the figures have on the environment around them is ambiguous, questioning how much we control nature and vice versa. Other recent works also have raised wood relief shapes. The works are not shown in any particular date order.

Viewers must open their own minds and then make them up as to what they see, like or dislike in the paintings; the only desire Nicolas Young has is that the next time they look they might see something new.