Robert Nickle began painting landscape watercolors while still a financial advisor at Morgan Stanley, principally because he wanted to make a statement about what was going on around him - the disappearance of what he calls the American Heritage. "There is a beauty I see in the old architecture of 75 or 100 years ago, a character and charm in things handmade of basic materials. There was care and pride of workmanship where cost was secondary to aesthetics and quality. It seemed that old barns and houses made of stone and wood with striking gables and ornate trim were being torn down and replaced with metal buildings. As Frederick Remmington and Charles Russell hurried to record the American Wild west as it vanished, I wanted to capture the beauty of our area's vanishing landscape."