Acrylic painter Nicholas Skally to have first solo exhibit
By: Lacey Korevec
For 30-year-old acrylic painter Nicholas Skally, art isn’t about recreating an image that already exists. It’s about adding layer upon layer of colors to create something unique and new.
His canvases are covered with thick slabs of paint, overlapping and dripping into swirls and bursts of blue, red, pink, gold and green, emulating abstract designs that can look like a flower, the sea or nothing but a carefully sculpted barrage of color. Twenty of his works will be on display at the Gourgaud Gallery in Cranbury through July.
"For me, my art is more about capturing an event and the painting is the event," he said. "Instead of trying to capture an image or a landscape or a building, it’s kind of looking at the painting process as the event itself."
Mr. Skally, a resident of Fairless Hills, Pa., uses a pallet knife to smooth acrylic paint and water onto his canvasses to build the perfect texture for his abstract creations.
"It’s more about the textures and the different layers and kind of seeing how the different colors work together and how they mix together and blend together too," he said. "So, there’s a lot of play between the colors and the canvas."
His technique is similar to that of abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. But Mr. Skally said he takes Pollock’s idea, which was to create a design with paint that was dripped onto a canvass, one step by further.
"I’m really interested in what happens as the paint drips off the canvas," Mr. Skally said.
The exhibit in Cranbury, titled "Let it Drip," is Mr. Skally’s first solo exhibit.
"I have had a lot of gallery appearances over the last few years but this is the first time the public will be able to see a large collection of my work," he said. "So, that’s really interesting. It will be kind of fun even for myself to see some of the artwork as it’s evolved over the years in one collection and one space."
A graduate of the University of Minnesota, where he studied journalism, Mr. Skally works full time in a marketing position. He’s been interested in art all his life and has been painting seriously for more than 15 years, he said.
"I have a day job but I’m trying to make painting a bigger part of my life and do it more full time," he said. "I’ve really been promoting my work a lot over the past few years."
Though he’s partial to abstract paintings, Mr. Skally said that he’s painted everything from landscapes to architecture.
"I’ve found a style that seems pretty unique and it’s just really fun for me," he said. "I can do the landscapes and figurative works, but I find extreme enjoyment in playing with the textures and the colors and it’s a lot more interesting to me than trying to recreate a scene or emulate something that already exists."
Mr. Skally said his art is different from what gallery-goers may have seen before and that viewing his exhibit will open their minds.
"My painting, in particular, is something they probably haven’t seen before," he said. "It’s going to be different than most of the paintings they’ve come across in their life and hopefully something that they’ll really enjoy."
"Let it Drip" opens tonight (Friday) with an artist’s reception from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Gourgaud Gallery.

