The varied subjects in George Nick's paintings - ranging from vintage automobiles to Back Bay street scenes, from Venetian waterways to Maine landscapes - reflect his appetite for experimentation. "I'm always reaching out for left-field ideas and approaches, trying to understand what I can do and what I can't do," says Nick. This freshness is reflected in Nick's paint handling, which, always lively and luscious, veers from crisply detailed strokes to broad swaths of color, sometimes within the same piece.

In his 2004 essay on the painting of George Nick, John Stomberg, the Deputy Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, coined the term “existential realism” to describe the particular arena in which Nick operates.  Yes, he is a realist, a painter in love with the world and its appearances, and, yes, he is, like the first generation abstract expressionists who were his peers in the 1950s, a painter whose work is a document of his moment-by-moment encounter with the art of painting.

In March, 2007, the Danforth Museum of Art (Framingham, MA) mounted George Nick: Spirit of Place featuring paintings executed by Nick in Rome in 2005. In a foreward for the exhibition's catalog John Updike wrote “In his most recent work, my impression is, he steps back from the virtuosic looseness and dash of the premier coup method into something like the precision with which he was portraying middle-class houses, solidly carved by sun and shadow, thirty years ago.  New paintings of sun-splashed domestic interiors, of Back Bay perspectives, of an antique tractor in snow and a retired fighter plane in a blue-tinted hangar all give us a third dimension soaked in light and a truthfulness so simultaneously blunt and intricate that we marvel.  At seventy-nine, George paints like a young man just discovering the appearances of things, discoveries that have nothing to do with the ego of the artist but everything to do with the world’s constant overflow of color and form.”

Nick's work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Hirschhorn Museum and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., among many others.

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