A Minute With Nathan Mullins
Hi! This is a newsletter about artists I like.
I began acquiring art through some friends that worked in galleries. I started small, working on a limited budget, for stuff I could afford. As time passed, my collection grew, and it was exciting to watch many of the artists I'd collected go on to bigger shows and critical acclaim. My goal with this newsletter is to make a digestible resource for anyone interested in artists that are making great (and still affordable!) work, whom you haven't heard about... yet.
I’ve followed Nathan’s work for three or 4 years now on Instagram after seeing some his baseball paintings and it took me back a bit to my baseball card collecting days. All the greats have been painted by Nathan ranging from Bo, Barry, The Big Hurt, and Will Clark. I guess that’s what initially got me but I keep being surprised by the subject matter and skill that Nathan uses for domestic scenes, couples, and much more. During summer he has been doing these plain air paintings which is just another reason why Nathan rules.
How is your summer going? The plein air paintings are really great by the way!
NM: Thank you! Summer's going really well for me. I currently have a group show up at Auxier Kline in NYC: Good Sports, featuring some really great artists, all making sports related work. I have a few paintings of baseball players in the show which ends July 28. I've been enjoying hiking around and making these plein air landscape painting and working from direct observation. It's been a good chance to focus on mark-making and working with color in a more immediate way, with limited materials and palettes.
Not to be stalker-ish but it says North Carolina, is that where you are for the summer or are you based there full time?
NM: I don't think that's stalker-ish at all; that's what those geo-tags on Instagram are for. I live in Petal, Mississippi, and I teach foundations art classes - Drawing and Design, an occasional Painting - at the University of Southern Mississippi. My partner and I are currently visiting her father's cattle farm in Lansing, North Carolina, which has provided a welcome respite from the 100 degree weather back in Mississippi. Unfortunately, we're leaving tomorrow to head back home, but it's been a good working vacation for both of us. Keri is working on her PhD in creative writing at USM, and she's been able to focus on writing while I walk around and paint. (I have to let you know that here I was interrupted by three yearling cows that escaped their gate; had to step out and go round them up real quick.)
Could our readers buy those from you directly?
NM: I'm not sure what I am going to do with these plein air paintings yet. I do have work at Auxier Kline, as I mentioned above, and also at Adah Rose Gallery in Kensington, MD. I also have paintings that I would be happy to sell directly, and I do commission work as well.
Do you have any shows coming up?
NM: Other than Good Sports at Auxier Kline, I don't have any upcoming shows planned at the moment.
What is currently motivating you right now ? Could be music, film, another artist?
NM: Starting with the baseball paintings, I've been focused more on what brings me joy in painting: a focus on mark-making and color interactions. And I'm trying to get away from letting painting be such a belabored process, which has dragged me down in the past. This isn't to say that it's not a hard or serious endeavor in the studio, but I'm trying to find ways, through working observationally and using images to find compositions rather than inventing them whole cloth, to make paintings more immediately. If the painting works, it works; if it doesn't, it doesn't. Allowing myself to let go of working and re-working images has brought a lot more enjoyment to the studio, which is the main thing keeping me engaged these days.
There's also always the pressure to keep producing, to stay engaged and "relevant," whatever that means. That nagging sort of energy is always there, but really I just feel better about life and everything if I've been productive. In a lot of ways it seems to be the only reasonable response to the general miasma of horrible news that can really bring you down if you don't have some sort of outlet.
I love your baseball series, will you remain loyal to baseball or take on another sport ?
NM: The baseball series began as a painting of Cal Ripken, Jr. that I made for my brother's birthday in May 2020. Ripken is his favorite player, and we used to collect baseball cards together when we were younger. I don't follow the sport. But while looking for that composition in highlight videos, something really kind of moved me in the way the camera follows and isolates the players on the field. It's a team sport, but here's a player enveloped in a sea of green, totally alone. It felt very familiar in the middle of the pandemic.
So I started going through my old collection of cards and picking out players I remember my brother talking about, watching old highlight reels and finding interesting compositions. The uniforms provide a lot of opportunity for fun color combinations, and the broadcast video allows for ghost images from crossfades and other distorted digital artifacts. I might grab an image of a player and insert it into another situation or simply allow the found composition to rest as is. The images, for me, possess a certain sadness in the isolation, and the game itself generates a lot of ideas that I have been trying to capture in my paintings: heroic mythology and the melodrama of victory and defeat, masculinity in America. These are deified athletes, modern gods. 2020 of course not only saw the pandemic but the protests in response to the killing of George Floyd. Baseball, as an American sport, begs the question of how our society can choose to both deify and demonize men of color. The paintings felt like a way of painting through those questions for me.
Painting from the found images allows me to focus on what I enjoy most about painting: immediate gestural marks made in carefully considered colors. I don't have to think about the composition, because I've already found it. I feel like I'm starting to rattle on a bit here, but all this to say that these are the reasons I started and continue to make the baseball paintings: it's not really about the sport. I may move on to other sports, but I'm still really pulled towards baseball.
Who should we have on next?
NM: Can I suggest two people? I studied with both of these artists. Tristan Barlow lives in London and is making very carefully considered paintings that deal with color, pattern, and light in an understated and poetic way. I don't know if this makes sense, but his paintings seem to me to contain a kind of incredibly loud silence. Sirena LaBurn lives in Texas and is making paintings both large and small that deal with the mythology of the American West with a keen eye for color. She's recently started working on a series of ceramic cowboy hats that incorporate vulvas in a really clever way.
love this dude's work - thank you
Love how he painted that swing. Great composition as well.