Nicholas Blowers was born in Essex, UK, in 1972. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Southampton University between 1991 and 1994.

Working in a realist style, Blowers creates paintings that explore themes of collapse and decay within the natural environment. His work focuses on landscape anomalies—places that feel out of place—such as mine tailings ponds, drowned forests, and edgelands. His compositions often present dense, unruly arrangements of nature, imbued with a sense of melancholy.

“There is a busy, chaotic feel to my work; a world of debris and clutter that one often finds in the Australian landscape. I search for places that have a heightened sense of drama and I’m interested in certain subjects because of their unruliness and anarchic structural elements. As a painter the subject’s primary meaning lies in paint, so my interest in decay and decrepitude is first and foremost painterly; it’s about form, texture, pattern and the connectedness of things.”

Blowers was awarded the prestigious Glover Art Prize in 2024, Australia's most significant landscape painting prize. He has also been a finalist in numerous other awards and won the Paddington Landscape Prize twice (2007 and 2009), as well as the King’s School Art Prize in 2007. His work has been exhibited in both solo and group shows across Australia and internationally, including recent appearances in the Wynne Prize and at the S.H. Ervin Gallery.

 

His paintings are held in corporate and private collections in Australia and overseas. He has been profiled in publications such as The Guardian and, more recently, The Weekend Age. Nicholas Blowers lives and works in Hobart.