Humans love making order out of chaos: sewing stories out of the randomness of life, drawing systems from disarray. We are order made out of chaos. Our individual tissues, cells, vessels do not breathe, but they come together to form a lung that can inhale and exhale. Our individual neurons can’t think, but come together to generate consciousness. Our breathing lungs and our cognition are emergent properties. They are attributes that result from various components that don’t have that characteristic on their own; they are each a sum greater than its parts.

In this series, there is a formal and conceptual search for emergent properties — properties that manifest themselves as the result of various systems working together such that the sum is greater than its parts. Formally, the paramount and final stage of the artist’s process is one of active discovery. He searches for emergence as he paints, choosing color, media, and style in the moment. This exercise involves creating some chaos, before uncovering the system, the final piece.

Conceptually, the artist and viewer both discover emergent properties. In Nick’s most complex portraits, dozens of layers vary in style, media, and application to create a seemingly chaotic visual. Nevertheless, the viewer finds a face, and a person emerges from the seeming madness. In his quieter, more restrained images, the viewer still seeks the subject from visual obscurity. They find the subject’s eyes, and a person emerges from the void. 

The viewer’s experience parallels the artist’s own relationship to his subject, which is universal to human connection. We are forever pulled between attempting to understand one another, yet never fully being able to put one’s self in another’s shoes. The deep curiosity to truly understand his fellow humans, impossible though it may be, has always been a driving force of Nick’s work.