Spotlight Artist

Nick McPhail

Pacific Coast
Artist profile photo

Hillside

Colorful painting of houses and trees with abstract, dripping orange and green patterns.

oil on canvas

Path

Pathway lined with green bushes leading to a white house with an arched doorway

oil on canvas

Sprinkler

Sprinkler watering green lawn in front of a house with hedges and a tree.

oil on canvas

Featured in New American Paintings1 / 3

Artist Statement

 The peripheral is at the core of my practice: what we see but do not focus on; what we overlook or take for granted. The quiet subject matter—empty streets, architecture meeting vegetation, power lines dividing the sky, dancing shadows on a wall—emphasizes the voyeuristic nature of urban life.

Every work begins as an observation; seen by the eye and memorialized through the lens of a camera, each image is then altered through paint. Personal memory and intuition guide each composition, creating a duality of location between what is remembered and what is real.

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