Nichols carried on family craft

She is closing her Nichols Art Studio at the south edge of David City and will be having a sale of her personal collection of paintings, both hers and those of other artists.

Classes began with family

Nichols and her husband Bill Payzant were busy raising their six kids when they lived in Idaho Springs, Colorado. In the 1960s, surrounded by the natural beauty of the Rockies, she and a few friends began teaching themselves how to paint and finally contacted an art teacher, Frederick Van Twente, to teach them.

Before long Nichols was hooked and began making pastel portraits. She had already spent countless hours drawing dresses and movie costumes as a young girl.

Moving back to Nebraska, Nichols’ family settled for a year in Fremont, then northeast of Schuyler.

They were living in Fremont when a Fremont Tribune reporter caught up with Nichols at an art supply store. A conversation followed her portrait of the reigning Miss Nebraska that Nichols created from a newspaper photo.

Word got around, and before long Nichols was setting up a studio in an old cafe on the east edge of Schuyler. She had already been teaching her own children to draw, paint and sculpt — partly out of necessity.

“It was the only way I could keep them busy so I could get some artwork done,” she said.

Before long, Nichols’ summer class was brimming at the Oak Ballroom, and for a few years the city scraped up some money to help employ some assistants. The teaching continued in Schuyler through the 1970s.

Her marriage ended in the early 1980s, and Nichols brought her art studio to David City. Before long she was teaching regular classes on the ground floor of the Thorpe Opera House, right next door to the youth center. She also contracted with the David City, Aquinas and East Butler school systems to teach art for weeks at a time.

The school classes and private lessons pushed her numbers into the hundreds of children who got a taste of art from Nichols, who also was busy creating her own art. On top of painting and sculpting, she also made a living out of expertly repairing and restoring statues — mostly of the religious variety — across a wide swath of eastern Nebraska.

Though teaching was what she loved the most.

Her students, she said, found an encouraging place where they could let their imagination flow. Criticism was not a concern.

“I never had a bad painting from a kid,” she said, explaining that it was important to help them grow through the process.

There were afternoons when a young artist might need to put down the brush and talk out a problem before they were able to concentrate on art.

Part of Nichols’ motivation was to provide a better education than she experienced as a child. She said she battled dyslexia in school, a problem that set her back in a time when such learning problems were not well understood. She was a steady F student, she said. It didn’t help that illness struck Floyd and he was bedridden while his wife Stella took care of him for the final years of his life.

On top of that, Nichols missed much of her junior year at David City High School as she required surgery to fix a leg problem. Told she would need to repeat the school year, she quit school and headed for the work force. Sixty years later, the Class of 1953 made sure she got a DCHS diploma based on her life’s experience.

Out of school, she went to work at the forerunner of Henningsen Foods, then as a nurse’s aide in Columbus, where she met her husband and started a family as she turned 18.

Nichols said a turning point came at the age of 11, when she worked as an usher at the Crest Theater on Fourth Street. The movies offered more than escape, since it was here where she became interested in performing and drawing and designing clothes. The theater manager allowed her to get on stage to sing — to an empty house.

“I’d sing my heart out,” she said, sometimes to the chagrin of her siblings.

“From the time I was 12 I was somewhat of an embarrassment,” she added.

Scrapbooks

The years have melted by, and many of the students whose photos fill Nichols’ scrapbooks are grown up and some are now grandparents. She has the satisfaction of knowing many went on to successful lives. A few ended up using their skills professionally as artists.

Part of her teaching skills came from her late aunt, Lilas Sanley, who died at the age of 99 in 2007. Sanley was always one of Nichols’ biggest supporters.

“She was the greatest joy of my life,” Nichols said.

Nichols said she tried to give students the kind of education she would have wished for as a child.

“(Teaching) has made me a better person,” she said. “I’ve learned tons from all of these kids. It has made me feel better about how it was when I was growing up.”

Adapting

Nichols isn’t hanging up her sculpting tools or her paint brushes, but she has to create a different kind of studio at home so she can cope with macular degeneration, which began hitting hard four years ago.

“I don’t want to sit down and watch life pass me by,” she said. “I have to keep going.”

As her sight got worse, she said she went through a period of self pity before contacting the Nebraska Commission for the Blind, which has helped her move on with her life. She said that if artist Georgia O’Keefe could keep working past the age of 80 with vision problems, so could she.

Nichols has been active in the Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art and helped build sets for youth theater. Her contributions to art and historical preservation earned her the Women in the Arts Recognition Award from the Daughters of the American Revolution in 2012. The new award was designed to recognize worthy women at the community level for outstanding achievement in nonperforming arts.

Nichols’ murals can be found in churches, community buildings and schools across the area.

The studio sale is scheduled for 1-6 p.m. Sunday at Nichols’ art studio, 665 S. Fourth St. in David City.