Conversation with Nasir Young
by Elizabeth Johnson, edited by Matthew Crain
Art Sync: Chasing My Own Satisfaction
Conversation with Nasir Young
February 2024
Art Sync: Chasing My Own Satisfaction
Head-Image
How Long's The Wait?, 14" x 11", Oil On Panel
Elizabeth Johnson: Your show Excursions feels like you are layering neighborhood and commercial imagery to tell a story about Philadelphia, making gritty commercial settings, which you call "visual clutter," charming and new.
Nasir Young: It’s like an excursion, a short journey, a leisure trip. That is the binding connection between the works. When I was little, I spent a lot of time traveling into and out of and throughout the city with my parents, and I was always gazing and watching stories unfold.
When I was a teen, my best friend––of twenty years now––introduced me to skateboarding, and I haven’t stopped. We would often pick a direction and skate for hours and miles, looking.
When I say “looking,” I mean the nature of skateboarding is finding different ways to look at the world and repurpose and manipulate it. Nothing is as simple as it looks.
EJ: Does Pop Art history inform your excitement about advertising, logos, and signs?
24 hr. Service, 12" x 16", Oil On Panel
NY: It has informed my knowledge of art history, but my excitement and focus on advertisement, logos, and signs come from two parts: my school background, and from growing up with Philly’s landmarks, which function as distinct visual iconography. The bulk of my time in art school (2013-2021) was studying illustration and graphic design, my favorite areas ranging from works that blend with text and learning how to weave a narrative with a single image. I am a heavy fan of golden age illustrators: J.C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, and N.C. Wyeth are some of my largest initial influences, adding in Edward Hopper the reluctant illustrator. My shift away from illustration to painting began with all the free time the pandemic lockdown gave me.
EJ: Ed Ruscha combines words and images to make visual and verbal puns, makes words into objects, and concentrates on script and typeface like you do. Do you relate to his work?
Nasir Young's Sketchbook
NY: I’ve seen images of it but not in person. I have great respect on the grounds that typeface and script can be a monster to work with. I often look for believable words that don't break the illusion compared to tight perfect forms. For me, type functions as a prop, but with his it feels like the vehicle for the conversation. I'd be interested to see one in person and see how I feel.
EJ: I gather that your paintings are generated from your own photos or sketchbooks, that you draw first on the panel or canvas, and sometimes let the under-drawing peek through. The sketchbooks give us direct access to your looking, thinking, and to-do lists, broadening your message to include the daily life of an artist. What is most exciting about your sketchbooks today? Do they best reveal where you are centered now and going next with painting? Would you make paintings or graphic novels in this loosely collaged style?
Studio Image of Beauty Salon, 24 hr. Service, Western Union and Sketchbook
Studio Image of Daytrip and Full Service
NY: My sketchbooks are possibly my most valuable possessions. I almost always have one on me. They function as melting pots of ideas and journals and self-management. They become like catalogs as I move on to the next one. With an overflowing amount of inspiration and ideas, I can go back to sketchbooks from a couple years ago and they still have exciting ideas that I might not have been ready for or are just rough around the edges. New things excite me, and I’m ready to jump into a new one even if I'm already working on twelve others. Each current sketchbook features new discoveries and, most importantly, hints of a direction I'm going (but you can find clues that point in that direction in the prior sketchbooks). Two of the works in the show, We Outside and Full Service, are newer investigations on composing images, riffing on how I compose my sketchbook. I have a lot more I want to play with but it’s just always a matter of what's exciting me the most.
Studio Image of Next Stop and Sketchbook
EJ: Your urban environments include graffiti, bricks, dirt, trash, cars, trucks, reflections, pavement, but few people. You organize texture, noise, and detail so well that the complicated world feels orderly, quiet, and introspective: it's your city. Snippets of figures work very well in Beauty Salon.
Is Next Stop deciding how realistic to take figuration? Or will you preserve the looseness of the sketch?
NY: Noise and clutter are what builds the world around us, especially man-made structures and objects. Everything in a city is intentionally designed and placed, right down to the trash. Similarly, figures also function as props in the narrative of a place. For a while I’ve been leaving figures hidden.
There will be some tighter figurative representation, but they will be tools to add to a narrative space, not the focus. (There will be two exceptions in the show with a figure holding a larger role.) I don't leave figures out because I dislike them; I look at contemporary figure painting more than landscape painting; I enjoy a balance of loose and detailed moments that create visual rewards for anyone who nerds out on those moments like I do.
Inside Out, 20" x 16", Oil On Panel
EJ: Does Pay to Play concern the removal of an ATM? Or are you making paintings sculptural? Inside Out flaunts logos of We Card, Western Union, Lotto, EBT, Backwoods beer, and the “Marl” of Marlboro. Graffiti hides the bank identity of Fast Cash. Did you rework the placement of the graffiti and logos in these paintings? Did you paint them as you found them? I love that keen observation transforms a mundane visit to a bodega or ATM into a mindful, unfussy statement.
NY: Pay to Play came from a mishmash of ideas I’ve been investigating. The original image came from this corner store in London that was so plastered with ATM and money-related images that I couldn't tell what the real name of the store was. That led me to think about the nature of its existence. Bouncing off that, I was exploring these works with windows into other imagery. I’ve been looking at a lot of sculptural work and shaped panels. It led me to think about what would happen if instead of simply painting a window, what if I took away your ability to experience the view all at one time, like with subscription walls and add-ons. Painting logos and graffiti and even posters, I tend to keep mostly true to what's present, but then play with the real scale and abstract some to make them sell the space without taking over. It's a game: going too far or not far enough will break the illusion I'm creating. The images that attract me are so everyday that almost everyone has a reference point experience with them, and I can build on everyone's collective knowledge.
Faces Of London #2, 6" x 7.5", Gouache On Paper
EJ: Faces of London #2 and Beauty Salon play with the pattern of the bricks by eliminating some dividing lines, softening the frontal, flatter, squarer quality of those two paintings. Smudgy areas summon a tactile response that balances the use of line for both rendering and texture. You seem to really love drawing lines. Do you use a ruler, or do you have a super-steady hand?
NY: I'm going to be honest. It's a cruel addiction: it's all done freehand, with the occasional drawn line over the painting. Anytime I’ve tried using tape or rulers, I end up redoing the section. I can see the imperfections, so I wouldn't call my own hands super steady. But it matches the believable space I'm building out. If the lines were perfect, it would highlight the areas that aren't technically accurate or exaggerated. Ultimately, I'm chasing my own satisfaction in my work. It becomes a reward for working details, like finishing a model kit: it’s really tedious and this is the enjoyment.
Faces Of London #4, 6" x 7.5", Gouache On Paper
EJ: You're a skateboarder, and looking at your work, I imagine the sound of wheels hitting the seams in pavement and making different sounds on different surfaces. Do you sometimes hear the rhythm of changes in your pictures? Faces of London #4 depicts deep physical depth. As you shift from the grey product cases in the foreground to the security gate, various architectural details, brick, graffiti, and address numbers, there is a flow broken by abrupt linear changes in your visual surface.
NY: I love that description for so many reasons, one being that riding my skateboard is a happy place and that it is one of the most satisfying sounds in the world to me. Hearing my work echoes that I can see the connection. I have been exploring variations of flat color and textures depicting volume. It's been a search for unity. I'm by no means a minimalist, so it's how I can make the noisiest, most-packed-with-information area balance in one image. I'm often reacting to what a space needs to work.
EJ: You put paintings within paintings, as in We Outside and Full Service. Do the double images make a story? Or are you attempting the transience of meaning and communication?
Studio Image of We Outside and Sketchbook
Full Service, 24" x 24", Oil On Panel
NY: Talking about these two works goes back to my thesis show at PAFA in 2021. I was thinking about the self-imposed boxes I was putting myself in. The first of these pictures-within-a-picture concerned translating eight years of undergraduate studies mostly focused on illustration and graphic design into painting. Initially, my thinking came from comic book panels and how a story is broken up for the viewer to experience a full narrative within one page. As I feel less of a need to illustrate, images have become tools to show time, fabricate larger narratives, and play with compositions similar to how I work in my sketchbooks. As for Full Service, I was working with the passage of time, and depicting a different personality with the same form, composing “inside-out” by zooming into the mini-mart.
By extension it becomes a third window. We Outside was different: it was taking two unrelated moments and fabricating a story that somehow connected them in some larger picture. Those two scenes were sketched next to each other in my sketchbook, and I liked the synergy and did a quick image of them together. With the double images I see them mainly as a storytelling tool.
Object Portrait: Traffic Barricade, 4" x 4", Oil On Panel
EJ: An Artblog review ("Hunger in Philadelphia and corner stores are focus at Da Vinci Art Alliance's 'Corner Stories'") mentions the Alchemy Art Ensemble. What is this?
NY: Alchemy Art Ensemble is a project created by one of my peers and friend, Eustace Mamba, with the goals of fostering community and being an umbrella of a group where different artists can work together and build something bigger than themselves.
Community is an important part of surviving as an artist, and the group is meant as a hub to create experiences together to put out into the world. Eustace and I and Jake Weiss put together a show that happened back in August, Corner Stories, which doubled as a food drive and opportunity to give back to the community, while having open conversations about food insecurities.
There currently aren't any new projects underway that at least I'm involved in, but there will be more projects with a variety of artists to come.
Latenight Snack, 16" x 12", Oil On Panel
EJ: Your artist statement says you are "a person who walks down the street looking at the brick and mortar, the markings on the wall, the trash on the ground wondering about its story." Does narrative enter at the instant of liking an image? Does it sustain working on a piece? Do you think of alternate stories for your paintings once they are done?
NY: It goes both ways. For some places it’s a scene I’ve seen a million times but this time shadows moved the right way to catch my attention. Other places, it’s me just constantly taking in information and curating it, becoming fascinated. I produce a lot of work. In 2023 I created forty-plus new works (and abandoned many more than that). The way I work is: everything is left open-ended with certain questions to lead the viewer around. I was thinking about your questions as they apply to my landscapes. Think of any scene from a movie and then separate the actors and environment. The actors are dependent on the environment to sell the story, but the same can't be said inversely. Place a different scene there and it will be an entirely different story.
––Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)
edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)
February 2024
Artist Nasir Young painting in his studio
February 8 - March 2
Nasir Young: Artist Statement
The landscape that draws me in is one of familiarity; spaces, memories, stories can be joined and exited. The work comes from a place of my hyper awareness of my surroundings. I am a person who walks down the street looking at the brick and mortar, the markings on the wall, the trash on the ground wondering about its story. My practice starts with the world around me; guided by the happenstance moments that you would miss if you blink just once. I document the small wonders. These range from shadows dancing around objects, visual clutter that tells a story. These may sit in my sketchbooks for months or years before it is time to use them. Every page of these books evokes memories of moments capturing a story that viewers often can relate too. I have to sit with this imagery and discover why it emotionally stirred me. When I go to bring these creations to life I use observation, studying the tiniest details of information that could be easily overlooked. My landscapes, and buildings are my characters with figures as supporting props, often depicting a drama and story with no figure ever being present.
My most recent work comes hand and hand with the past two years I lived in South Philadelphia. Through them, you can see the glow, the specific color palette, and the personalities of the environment. You learn so much about the spaces through the visual vocabulary built upon by every corner, every window, and mark on a wall. My work has been decoding these narratives and spotlighting them to champion the mundane for all its worth.
Moving forward, my practice is seeking out the threads that tie together the larger identities of the cityscape. These connectors bring together even the most surprising stories you would not connect at first glance. Once you find these ties, there's only more to discover. What is the visual language of a corner store in London, versus Philly, versus Virginia, or even Tokyo. These translate no matter where in the world you go but feel so different from each other.
After Hours, 22" x 10", Oil On Panel