Born in San Francisco in 1948, Nik C. Colyer lived his first twenty-three years in Hayward, a small suburban community east of San Francisco. At age eighteen, he scraped together enough paychecks from his work as a mechanic to purchase his first Harley Davidson; a ’59 Panhead.
Riding and repairing his own bike eventually led him to create Cycletherapy, a Harley repair shop, where he built custom machines for local riders.
He maintained his business for five years, until at the age of twenty-three, a new direction caused him to close his doors and go back for a year of college where he found his next career as an artist, creating bronze and stone sculpture.
Following his art sabbatical, in May 1974 Colyer moved to the Northern California Sierra Nevada Mountains where he spent a year on a forty acre ranch with ten other like-minded young people. During his first snowbound winter, living in the community library, he found himself surrounded by a collection of well-worn paperback novels. Without electricity or television, he devoured fiction classics such as; Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Herbert’s Dune, and hundreds more.
Inspired by such greats, he revisited a childhood longing, picked up a pen, and the seeds of a writing career emerged. It took another six years before he started his first novel, “Hunters Field” and twelve years to complete that prodigious project. Once he felt the success of completion, he dedicated more of his life as a novelist.
Colyer gets up every morning at 4 a.m. to write. Using that early morning method, his next three novels, DIAS, Maranther’s Deception, and Channeling Biker Bob took less than a year each to finish. His philosophy is simple; “If I average writing a single page a day, in less than a year I’ll have a finished manuscript.”
To date, Nik Colyer has completed twenty novels, three screen plays two books of poetry and one travelogue. Although most of his work is fictional, Nik draws from his early experiences of riding Harley’s, as well as his subsequent thirty-five year transformation into integrated masculinity. His unending curiosity about the relational dance between men and women adds humor and quirkiness to the content of his writing. Finding equilibrium between the tough biker, while staying close to authentic masculine feeling, is a theme throughout much of his writing, especially in the Channeling Biker Bob series.
Although writing novels is his first love, he and his wife Barbara continue their romance with sculpture through the process of making gold and silver jewelry.
Nik found watercolor painting late in his life when a friend dropped a pad and set of watercolors in his lap while they sat on a beach in Oregon. To date he has completed 50 paintings with more on their way. Check out his work at: Other Projects.
Acrylics came later. When he wants to create smaller paintings he uses standard over-the-counter pre-stretched frames.
For his larger frames, he likes participating in the entire process. He cuts dead cedar and fir trees from his property, mills the wood, makes the frames to stretch raw canvas, creates an acrylic subject or design then cuts and coves cedar to build the finished picture frame.
View more of his creations on Etsy or FineArtAmerica