An Interview With Nigel Sanders
Interview: Monica Magtoto
ABC: Tell us a little bit about what you do, artwise.
NS: Short answer: I am an illustrator/printmaker. My day job is as a screen printer and then at night I come home and paint and/or print some more.
Long answer: I work in a lot of different mediums, formats and styles, a lot of times I’ll do straight narrative illustration and portraits, but most recently I’ve been working a lot in combining painting and screen printing, using a lot of layering and juxtaposing imagery to suggest meaning. I’ve always been a big fan of combining a lot of stuff, really overloading to create a larger portrait. To be wordy and artsy about it, it’s working with a lot of iconography along with themes of conception of self and how media and advertising work on the mind. Also sometimes I just like painting some chicks.
ABC: What was the worst critique/review/feedback you were ever given and how did it make you feel?
NS: I try and take something from all the feedback I get, be it about the actual technique or the idea behind the work. So the worst critiques to me are ones where nothing is really said at all, which strangely enough, are usually the positive ones. Stuff like “I like it.” means nothing, obviously I appreciate it, but there’s got to be something in particular or whatever. Someone can say they like something, and not give a reason why, and it’s no more useful than a critique where the person obviously doesn’t see any merit in the work.
Along those lines though, I did have a sculpture type teacher a long time ago who gave us an assignment to do something with gardening gloves, didn’t matter what it was. So I ended up making this giant sculpture of hands coming out of the ground, like they had grown and ripped the gloves apart, Hulk-style. And this teacher hated it, just really shit on the idea and execution, which admittedly was probably a bit shoddy, but not to the point where you couldn’t see where it was going and what I could have done given more time to get it down right. But the critique of the work was so useless, so non-constructive in it’s negativity that there was nothing I could take from it except anger. The coda to that story is that the entire class eventually ended up feeling the same way about this teacher’s comments about their work and basically had an in-class mutiny because we all hated him. It was intense. But yeah, feedback, be it positive or negative, is worthless to me if it’s not constructive, cause then I can figure out if it’s something I want to process into how I’m doing what I’m doing.
ABC: How did that experience change or not change the way you feel/felt about your art?
NS: It taught me that you’ve got to believe in what you do, that sometimes there are going to be people who don’t like what you do, but that can’t take away from what you think about it. To paraphrase a quote I probably misheard once “One of something is an aberration, 10 of something is a series, 100 is a collection, and 1000 is a movement”, you’ve just got to keep going.
ABC: What did you do about it?
NS: Never did sculpture again, so there’s that, wasn’t really my thing anyway though.
ABC: Talk a little bit about your blogs and what you aim to do with them.
NS: I’ve had a lot of blogs over the years, not really as self-promotion or the journal aspect (though I’ve had both) but more as way of sharing things I like to the larger world, there’s a lot of really interesting stuff and work being done, and I like sharing what I find, as well as seeing other people’s interests and inspirations. For now I keep a blog of just inspiration and stuff I like (http://nigelsanders.tumblr.com) and then one just of my work and progress (http://thisisnigel.tumblr.com), so all of it doesn’t get lost in the noise and frequent posting of the other blog.
It’s tough not to spend my day just looking at a lot of really awesome work (and getting a bit discouraged), especially since Tumblr’s come around, and working on stuff to fill the other blog, but I think it can be important to stay fresh and on top of the possibilities and ideas floating out there. I’ve had ideas to turn previous blogs into a magazine or more fully realized and focused outlet, something that actually produces content rather than just aggregating it, but that’s tough to tackle, and I’ve got enough on my plate.
ABC: There is kind of a pop, film noir aspect to your work. Where does this inspiration come from and what does it mean to you personally?
NS: I’m a huge fan of the noir era, the films, photography, the writing, it all resonates with me. Obviously the lighting and composition was so key and so dramatic back then, it’s a lot of fun to try and capture that and juxtapose it with the modern world. As a kid I was really into extremely well-lit areas or extremely dark areas, no vague shadows. I remember my dad’s car had a little door in the backseat in which you could access the trunk and I would go through there and just hang out on drives home, as weird as that sounds. But I would watch as the brake lights make everything in the trunk glint red and just be fascinated by it. And then at home, being the half-asian I am, I would pretend to be a ninja, and try and move around in complete darkness. I got a lot of bruises in those days.
ABC: What inspired the “Robots” series?
NS: I have a big spiel about how it relates to the speed at which modern technology updates, and how people are at different levels of understanding it and thus the world, and how it creates larger gaps in communication because everyone has different reference points; but that the one thing that is common is emotion, and that will never change, even if our ability to express it and process it changes, which, along with the technology aspect, is what inspired the vintage robot looks.
In all honesty though, I wanted to paint some robots, doing some fundamentally human things, in my head creating this larger world where robots live and how things in our world would look or be realized there. Same thing they did in the beginning of Howard the Duck, which might have been the only good thing about the movie.
ABC: How does being multi-cultural influence your work?
NS: It doesn’t manifest itself in my work so much in that I don’t call attention to it or draw specifically from it, it’s who I am but it’s not what I feel I need to share visually to the world, if that makes sense. But i think it does have a larger influence on my outlook and my perception of the world, which obviously comes through into the work, to be all post-moderny about it. I mean, my mom is Filipino, and my dad is English, both of them came to America and then I came along, and then my step-dad is a black man and my step-mom is a woman who was raised Jewish but whose family can be traced back to the Mayflower ships, so my immediate family was like America personified. All of that plays a role in where I’m coming from. What exactly? Couldn’t say.
Though I recently came across the term “Hazn” for half-asians, and I’m a big fan of that.
ABC: How does one man build an entire printmaking studio in his back yard in one summer?
NS: Through sheer stubbornness, a little bit of know-how, same savings stacked up, good ol’ Google, and not caring about building codes. I had a friend who did construction who came over recently and he was looking at going “ohhh, this ain’t so good” but overall he said it wasn’t too bad, which for my limited knowledge of actually building structures felt pretty good. Though if a strong earthquake hits, it ain’t gonna be pretty. The whole thing’s been great and useful, so I’m happy.
ABC: Do you have any more secret projects/endeavors up your sleeve?
NS: You mean besides my earthquake-causing volcano? er, I guess I shouldn’t mention that. Well, I always have ideas germinating, so yes is the short answer, but I’ve got a couple ideas for larger group shows, and I’ve got some offers for some interesting longer-term projects which may or may not come off. And I want to continue with the book of music portraits I did, and paint more robots, so I’ve got no shortage of work ideas, whether I can get to them or not. But right now I’m just focusing on painting and submitting work, and doing print-for-hire work.
ABC: With all of your work, how do you find time to DJ, bike, and take care of Nigel?
I’ve stopped checking Facebook pretty much, so that’s one thing. I don’t really know though, I just try to stay busy, can’t really explain it, I’m really good at focusing and multi-tasking I guess, I always try to stay productive. Can’t say I take very good care of myself though, sometimes I’m working and I forget to eat, or sleep, or blink, that one gets painful.
ABC: What would like to say to the other underdogs out there?
NS: If you feel like an underdog, embrace it, use it, take it as motivation. Who are you under, who is over you, what are they doing, and what are they doing that you’d like to be doing, how can you get there? Underdogs don’t stay that way for long, but they are counted out for some reason, so it’s up to you to make yourself at least a regular dog, if not a top dog.
Also, any underdogs should check my website out:
http://www.NothingRhymesWithNigel.com for no other reason than I would do the same for you.
