​

 

                  Reviews

 

"The recognition by the art world of both the unique contribution of an artist along with the understanding of how they fit in the lexicon of great generational painters is one of the higher forms of adulation.  P.A. Nisbet is from a lineage of devotion to landscape and seascape painting that recalls Moran and Turner but does not copy them.  He is a bit of a throwback to the craft of careful observation of nature, elevating his paintings beyond the often photographic familiarity of modern contempary landscapes or impressionist knockoffs.  This is one serious student of his craft, who pushes himself to greater and greater personal clarity no matter what the subject of his works.

​

Bruce Faure / Ramparts of Civilization    November 19, 2017

​

"The Tucson Museum of Art show has acres of work by Moran's descendents, the Western realist painters who are sometimes naughtily called cowboy artists. Many are extremely capable, such as P.A. Nisbet, whose "Storm Break at Yaki Point, Grand Canyon" gets the prestige opening slot in the exhibition, right next to a rather dark 1942 Ansel Adams. Nisbet has painted a variation on the canyon cliche by adding snow to the ground and storm clouds to the sky. His painted light is a marvel..."

 

Margaret Regan / Tucson Weekly Magazine    August 31, 2006

 

"In Taos Gorge [shown on the book's cover] New Mexico artist P.A. Nisbet portrays the ragged slash of the Rio Grande River that bisects New Mexico's Taos Valley with transparent, atmospheric light and spiritual force, an image worthy of Frederick Church or Albert Bierstadt. For Nisbet [b. 1948], nature, as embodied in a painting, is elusive, intellectual, and emotional. More importantly, though, it is spiritual."

​

Donald J. Hagerty / Author of Leading the West, 100 Painters and Sculptors   Southwest Art Magazine   September, 1997 

 

"P.A. Nisbet is a very good painter, something of a throwback to an earlier artistic age, quite unlike our own, an age that considered craftsmanship and integrity givens in the creative process and had the technical means to back it up.

 

Nisbet's landscapes are quite luminous, carefully built up through multiple layers of paint and interspersed glazes that explore the rich opaque/transparent possibilities of the oil medium. The light that emerges is both a technical achievement and a creative, spiritual one expressing the highest levels of artistry and the symbolic meaning of light as divinity.

 

Thus the artist, in cloud studies where light breaks through or rises above darkness, or in landscapes where light may softly or strongly glow upon and model the rolling land, is expressing very profound ideas, genuinely redemptive for our materialistic, over-stressed era. His atmospheric paintings resonate with a healing reality that ties us more strongly to the deeper, richer levels of existence and the soul.  P.A. Nisbet is a genuine artist working with and toward a genuine vision and understanding of the world."

​

Don Gray / Critic    The Valley Arts Review, Phoenix

 

"Nisbet travels throughout the varied landscapes of the Southwest and Mexico as the basis of his working method. On-location studies and sketches serve as aids for the eventual painting, but his most important record is his memory of the experience in dimensions that might be called both physical and metaphysical. Really, they are one, and the awareness is the point of the paintings.

​

One might equally say that Nisbet is an earnest and evocative student of the psychology of space, light, and the horizon, taking the word to its root in psyche, the vital mental or spiritual principle of matter. And just as that principle is taken to be both integrated with and independent from the material world, Nisbet's paintings engage us with their physical subjects at the same time they release us to our own quests."

​

David Bell /Critic   Santa Fe Reporter    Santa Fe, New Mexico