Nick Young

Contemporary mixed-media artist Nick Young was born in Ottawa and now resides in Toronto. He holds a degree in architecture from the University of Toronto and has practiced professionally for 10 years. In 2009, Young became a full-time artist, and his work has now been exhibited in galleries across Canada, published in architectural and design magazines, and acquired by corporate and private collectors worldwide.

His architectural background and urban landscape strongly influence his style. Working in plan, section, and elevation, each painting is an abstraction and exploration of new spaces through the fundamentals of colour, composition, and texture. Relying on intuition rather than preconceived images, each painting is the result of layers upon layers of quick gestures. This palimpsest approach of adding, deleting, and leaving traces of layers’ past gives each piece a strong sense of memory and atmosphere. Like a city’s fabric, structural and organic forms merge, and boundaries become blurred, in an attempt to create visual poetry.

“I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”  – Joan Miro