“The aesthetic and the ethical are no great distance apart, as Rilke’s tenderly phrased adoration of Cezanne suggests. Those of us lucky enough to know GEORGE NICK in the flesh must sometimes shield our eyes against his core of blazing dedication, and smile at the elaborate apparatus of his sainthood – the famous picture-window truck, almost a Magritte fantasy in its placement of a miniature studio on wheels, once painted bright orange and now a more camouflaging green, ornamented with a martyr’s wreath of parking tickets. Cezanne and Monet, trudging out into the heat and rain with their three-legged easels, have nothing on this daily pilgrim. Rising at dawn to arrive miles distant as a certain slant of morning light befalls a chosen railroad bridge or storefront, he is nature’s acolyte; no mere coincidence has brought him to dwell in Emerson and Thoreau’s town of Concord. Dedicating himself to representation ·in the heyday of abstract expressionism, he had Fairfield Porter’s stubbornness without Porter’s family fortune. Both the serenity and harshness of the independent spirit speak in his canvases, in a mood of morning light, with most of the day still to come. The “here it is” of his paintings does not need to advertise love; love exists here not as a sentiment but as a basic condition of being.”

—John Updike, excerpt from his essay titled “In Praise of George Nick” for the catalogue for Nick’s 1993 retrospective at the Mass College of Art.

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