For more than four decades, while pursuing a career as a lawyer, state trial judge and federal judge, Alfred Nicols has been painting southern landscapes, and has achieved recognition as a premier Mississippi artist with a unique style and vision and, most recently, as a novelist.
After receiving undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Mississippi and serving in the military, he started his legal career, while creating his legacy in his art.
His paintings hang in the Federal Court House at Jackson, the Mississippi Supreme Court, The Mississippi Bar Center, the University of Mississippi., Mississippi College School of Law, University Medical Center, several hospital, schools, banks and other private businesses and homes throughout the state. The artist and his works have also been the focus of numerous magazines and exhibits, and Mississippi Educational Television’s “Mississippi Roads” featured him in a 2002 program.
Nicols authored Lost Love’s Return, a book written to leave his children, grandchildren and others insights into life’s issues and the value of family ties:
“With a long and blessed life in my law office, in the court room, in social settings and family environments, I have experienced constant opportunity to observe humanity in all its dimensions -- love and hate, good and evil, faith and doubt, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, our potential for jealousy, selfishness, resentment and oppression, as well as our potential for selflessness, concern, support and love,” he said in describing the book’s intention. “Approaching 80, I felt I had learned much about the choices we make in life and their consequences. Jesus taught us so well with his parables. Perhaps I could create a novel with a plot, characters and scenes that could pass what I’ve learned on to my children and
grandchildren -- and maybe even to others -- to read when they were old enough.”
Nicols and his wife Mary live in rural Mississippi.