Nathaniel Mary Quinn:

What You See Is Grace

Ashley Stewart RödderHow are you feeling as you prepare for your September show?

Nathaniel Mary QuinnI’m in the final lap of completing the works, so I feel good physically and my energy is strong.

ASRThat’s amazing. Has there been anything that’s motivated you along the way? I know you love podcasts and you read a lot—

NMQYes, I’ve been listening to a plethora of long-form YouTube podcasts, ranging from discussions of the current political landscape to relationships. Then in the evening I turn my attention to the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR is one of my favorites, because they do various interviews with different people: actors, singers, writers, researchers, historians, doctors, scientists. The guests share experiences that most of the public wouldn’t know, and I find many of their testimonies encouraging and motivational. I try to listen to things I find entertaining, engaging, and fun. It works as suitable backdrop noise and it often doesn’t require a lot of attention, because I just want to focus on the work I’m making. I use those podcasts as a metric of time: I normally try to pick a podcast that’s about two hours long, and then I know how long I’ve been painting.

On occasion I listen to podcasts on art history. You learn about the Impressionists or the Italian Renaissance or the Harlem Renaissance. Those podcasts offer insight into the lives of artists and the worlds in which they grew up. Oftentimes, when we think about these artists we laud as masters, we fail to consider the world in which they lived at that time in history. For example, I would argue that there is no contemporary painter who paints like Caravaggio. And I think, Well, why is that the case? It’s not that human evolution has grown in such a way that today’s artists no longer possess the capacity to make paintings of that caliber. The world in which Caravaggio lived was a society ruled by kings. There was no such thing as a democracy. So how did that political landscape impact artists like Caravaggio and his view of the world? What kind of pressure was he under to make a painting of that caliber? During that time there were no art galleries either, right? I mean, artists were commissioned by members of the aristocracy. So essentially you were working for one’s lordship. It isn’t like today, where artists are represented by a gallery. It isn’t like a Medici family anymore.

ASRSome might argue that those families still exist, but in a different way.

NMQTrue, there are parallels, but the political ties the Medici family had in Florence were very different.

ASRIn talking about podcasts, you seem drawn to peoples’ characters, their psyches. When I was in the studio you mentioned Alice Walker’s book The Third Life of Grange Copeland [1970], and how it played a pivotal role in the inception of the upcoming exhibition. The underlying themes of that book have to do with the dynamics of power, the psyche of this particular character in this hostile environment. Could you describe how you came across the book, and how it inspired this body of work?

NMQMany years ago, when I was a teacher at CASES, a New York nonprofit that works with at-risk youth, they had a library, and as I was looking through the books there, I came across The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Just by chance—I didn’t know it existed but the title caught my attention. I read the book and was very moved by it. To this day it remains in my top ranking in terms of literature. I always look back at different passages to get ideas, and I wanted to make a show that would broadcast these characters from the book. I don’t know what these characters look like, right? It’s not a picture book, it’s a piece of literature. And Alice Walker is one of the most formidable authors ever born on American soil. She’s not didactic, she’s not preachy, she doesn’t go through the trouble of clearly defining what these characters look like. That was advantageous for me because it gave me the opportunity to explore my imagination about these characters, which then opened a pathway for me to find more palpable links between the figure and abstraction. So this book was a great foundation for me to launch into this campaign of abstraction in the figure. And that’s pretty much it in a nutshell. It’s also an ode to my love and admiration and reverence for literature. I want to pay homage to that part of my disposition as a person and as an artist.

ASRSince I’ve known you, you’ve been driven by complex humanity. I think taking literature and applying that to a body of painting is an exciting evolution in your practice. In terms of subject matter, when you think of these fictional characters versus real people you’ve interacted with in your community, do you find similarities, differences? Do you find a difference between how the visions come to be?

NMQThere are similarities, definitely, but they’re also different. What remains is that I’m generating visions. It’s challenging because the fact of the matter is, I wasn’t born in the late 1800s. I don’t know what it’s like to be an immediate descendant of a sharecropper. I never worked on a farm. I never grew up in the South, in these parts of Alabama, Georgia, or North Carolina. So a lot of the process of making the work was born from my visions and my imagination as predicated on the book. On the other hand, the trials and tribulations that the characters endure in the book do undoubtedly remind me of my upbringing in Chicago, and of the trials and tribulations I had to endure, my family had to endure, and, more empathetically, what my neighbors in that community had to endure. So that would be the correlation between the two.

The book also gave me insight into what life may have been like for my mom and my grandmother. They were from the South. I don’t know anything about my mother’s upbringing when she was a child and a teenage girl, but this book helps to give me some sense of what life may have been like for a woman growing up in Mississippi, which is where my mom is from. It gives me the chance of a connection with what her life may have been like, her family and friends and the community she came from.

ASRWe’re all thinking not only forward but also backward. Like the historical artists you mentioned as reference points for you, seeing what the world was like during their time.

NMQYes. Another influence on the show is Francis Bacon. We saw exhibitions of his work together in London at the National Portrait Gallery and before that at the Royal Academy. Seeing those exhibitions moved me in ways that no other exhibition ever has. I’ve felt a kinship with this Irish-born, British-raised painter, this man I’ve never met.

Francis Bacon spent considerable time on a farm in his youth. That’s why he developed such an interest in animals. And once again, I never worked on a farm, but the way he was able to articulate that experience on canvas, coupled with his obvious campaign to defy traditional ways of looking at art and making art, has been very impactful for me. And I wanted to find ways to explore that in my own studio practice, because I had the bug. I just had to find a way to do it in my way through my language and my visual exploration, because I’m not Francis Bacon, I’m me. I wanted to find a way to express me through the influence of this great artist.

ASRSpeaking of the National Portrait Gallery in London, you just finished an impressive run of exhibiting a number of your works there, as well as at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the North Carolina Museum of Art, in Raleigh. How do you feel when you see these works out in the world?

NMQI still pinch myself, because I never thought the day would come when my works would be in institutions of this caliber around the world. I’m sure other artists feel the same way. I mean, look, on the one hand I’ve been a full-time artist now for about eleven years. You do grow accustomed to it because it just becomes part of your life. But on the other hand, I can never escape the surreal nature of it all. Seeing my name on the walls of these museums, and then having people I’ve never met visit the museums to look at my work and respond to it, is incredible. I don’t have the capacity to diminish my sense of gratitude. I’m not wired that way. My gratitude and my humility for the fortune of my work’s presentation in such institutions will always be very high, very, very high, because it didn’t have to work out this way. And my mother’s name is in those museums too, because my name is Nathaniel Mary Quinn.

ASRSo she’s experiencing the success you’re having as well?

NMQYes. This woman who was poor, illiterate, never traveled, never been anywhere, had no money, no real prospects of upward mobility. No one cared about her; now her name is on the walls of these institutions throughout the world. Even when I had my solo museum show at the Museo Bardini in Florence, Italy, I go there and my name, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, is there in the bedrock of the Italian Renaissance. I’m speechless. This is why I continue to work as hard as I do, because I care. I really do care about what I do. I don’t take myself superseriously. I don’t presume that what I do is so important that it transcends what everyone else is doing. It’s not like that. But in my cocoon of working in the studio, my little world, as insignificant as it may be to a lot of people, it’s very meaningful to me. Which is why I give my all to make the best works of art that I can possibly muster with all the strength that I have.

ASRWell, humility is such an important trait, and I think that’s why you can make those works, because you have that character. Many times we’ve talked about the compositions of the figures and what’s happening in the foreground, but I’ve noticed in these works, you’ve really started developing the background more. Can you tell me a little more about how you got to this place? You’ve told me about finding the technical strength to get to this point.

NMQYes. For the past two or three years I’ve been contemplating placing my figures in an environment, and also exploring ways I can introduce cityscapes and landscapes, which is something I’ve never done but I thought maybe I should give it a shot. It wasn’t contrived, either; I really wanted to be genuine and to do it from a place of real conviction. What that means is, look, I’m not a landscape painter, I’m not a cityscape painter, and I have tremendous respect for those kinds of painters, but I’m a figurative painter. I felt like it made sense, as long as I was still working with the figure, to find ways to intertwine it with an environment or world. That felt more honest for me as
an artist.

And when I began to reexplore Walker’s novel, it clicked. Those stories, the experiences of the characters in that book, helped me build a foundational defense for making sense of the marriage between figures and environment. I could stand by that with great conviction and confidence, and that’s how everything began to take shape. Beyond that, I had to change the way I looked at my paintings as well, because of course, when you put a figure in a world or an environment, you have to consider the total harmony of the painting as a whole. It’s not just about the figure now, it’s about how those colors compositionally join the rhythms of the activity around that figure. So that required a particular shift in my viewing of the works. I wanted to always try to maintain contrast. That’s a big thing in this body of work, the power of contrast, bright and dark, light and heavy, warm and cool, simplicity and complexity, always finding ways to put two competing forces next to each other. I want the paintings to be as palpable and robust as I can possibly make them.

As you know, Ashley—you’ve been to my home many times—I’m a very organized person in my daily life. You see how neat my studio is; I introduced that into my work as well. So it’s a lot of straight lines, very clean. It’s organized. There’s a structure, because I find that to be a strength in my practice. Some artists are the very opposite of that, and it works for them. But for me, that’s my natural disposition. So I wanted to make sure to implement that into the paintings. This is an all-painting exhibition, fourteen paintings, and it’s the first time I’ve done that. So with all of the elements I described, I’m pulling ’em together like the Avengers—

ASR[Laughs] To attack the canvas.

NMQThat’s it. And to produce the best body of work that I can make at this point in my career.

I also looked at a lot of paintings by Edward Hopper as reference material for dealing with space. Hopper was a cityscape painter, and I learned a lot from the way he negotiated space.

ASRYou’re quite intentional about where the figure is sitting in the canvas and developing these landscape backgrounds, but you’re also really intentional with the titles. And something I noticed with this body of work: you coined or incorporated the language “paint drawing study” into several titles for the show. Could you talk more about that?

NMQSimply put, before this body of work I made use of construction paper and frisket, which is like a plastic film, to demarcate or isolate sections of the figure. I moved away from that, which then allowed for the introduction of more line work in the paintings. So, in effect, the lines have become the replacement for the construction papers and the frisket film. And I’m painting, yes, and I’m also incorporating movement of lines and contour drawings and different strokes here and strokes there. So there’s an element of drawing in the painting, and that’s why I like the term “paint drawing,” because drawing is my first love. I didn’t want to lose my attachment to drawing so I wanted to find a way to bring it into painting. I saw no reason to completely eradicate drawing from my practice. I can incorporate an incredible amount of rendering to construct an eye, and then in other cases the eye is rendered with just lines. That’s it. Just like a drawing. It’s simple, but as long as it’s harmonious in its implementation in the work as a whole, that’s the real key, because otherwise it feels like a distraction. It’s clunky.

You know what I don’t want? I don’t want a viewer to have trouble enjoying the work. You don’t wear a winter coat in the dead of summer. It’s like that kind of idea. If you watch great sprinters run, they’re moving at, I don’t know, fifteen miles per hour, but they look very relaxed. So you can just enjoy that performance.

ASRLike a ballet dancer on stage.

NMQThat’s right. You don’t see the gruel and the labor; what you see is grace. You see a seamless performance. So that’s what I call paint drawing.