Nick Herd, A Quiet Turning of Flowers

online exhibition: 
Nick Herd
A Quiet Turning of Flowers
May 17 - April 14, 2026

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present A Quiet Turning of Flowers, an online exhibition by Sydney-based artist Nick Herd and his debut with the gallery. The exhibition features eight still life oil paintings created from direct observation. Herd begins with simple arrangements; flowers cut from his garden or a few beautiful stems procured from a farmers’ market and set in a vase on a table. Responding to the bouquets as they shift over a few days—opening, leaning, and deepening in tone—the paintings follow. The resulting works are not fixed images but accumulations of time, with observation, memory, and revision becoming compressed into a single surface.

Working from his sundrenched studio along the coast of New South Wales, Herd moves between painting and the ocean. Mornings spent surfing flow into afternoons in the studio where the light is so bright his vision can become distorted. Attention and instinct become inseparable, and that same responsiveness from the morning carries into the work. While Herd’s painting style is raw and gestural in approach, his choice of a pastel dominated palette imbues a sense of serenity in the works—moments of rush and vigor give way to bliss.

In Roses on Tablecloth (2026), flowers stand in a vase set on a checked tablecloth against a seafoam green background. The image is not so much painted as it is assembled. The tablecloth is composed of red paint squeezed directly from the tube and wiped with a wide paintbrush thickly loaded with white paint. Globs of brownish maroon, dark green, and orange paint are pushed, scraped and wiped into an abstraction that is understood as blossoms. Thick swaths of pale green feel like they are swollen with the salt in the air. The image remains unstable, held in continuous adjustment rather than completion. There is a confidence in the handling of paint, where edges are pushed, softened, or lost entirely, allowing form to emerge through weight, color, and pressure.

In the studio, books of Frank Auerbach, Pablo Picasso, and Willem de Kooning’s Women paintings, remain close at hand, along with a book of Japanese color combinations that Herd returns to for its clarity and subtle tonal shifts. These references function less as sources than as permissions, to let structure emerge through gesture and to allow color to carry form. The rhythm of the work reflects this approach, moving between buildup and release. Like waiting for the right wave, the painting is resolved through timing—arriving at a point where it holds, even as it remains open.

Images: studio shots and artist portraits by Alex Greaves