John Nicholas

Artist on VibrantCast

I’ve been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember, and around age ten I discovered pastels. Names I followed as a kid were artists like Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell, but also rocket scientists and pilots like Werner Van Braun and Charles Lindberg, so for college I chose a career I thought to be more lucrative and less risky than art: aerospace engineering. I rationalized, there is art in engineering. Just look at the works of Leonardo da Vinci! Then I went to graduate school for still more engineering. But throughout it all the right-brain kept tugging. I take numerous photographs, almost always thinking they might become part of a painting. Favorite subjects: mountains and rushing water, waves, city life, panoramas and vistas; sometimes people. All of my scenes are from places I’ve travelled such as Colorado and Italy, both which I love and visit often.