Studio Visit: Nick Wilkinson
By Christina McPhee
Nick Wilkinson lives and works on California’s Central Coast. Beyond having a full-time painting practice and owning a specialty plant nursery, Nick owns and directs Left Field Gallery in Los Osos, with a focus on contemporary painting and sculpture.
Notable exhibitions of his paintings include Body High, a three-person show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles, alongside Rema Ghuloum and John Mills (2017); and Does It Make a Sound at Ochi Gallery, Ketchum (2018).
I visited Nick at his studio, tucked in the back lot of his “grow zone,” a nursery for plants destined for his two horticultural businesses, Botanica Nova and Grow. Here, behind a near-forest of succulents and other drought- tolerant species, Nick tenaciously pursues a vision of abstract color and line, in canvases that themselves seem to proliferate like new growth at every turn. We jumped into a discussion of form and process almost immediately.
Christina McPhee: Nick, you and I share certain territories as painters, not least, the love of color and how the interrelationships of color create rhythms across canvases, spilling from one to the next. With these new paintings you’re refining key gestures – arabesques, lines, colors.
Nick Wilkinson: Yes, here I’d make a line, like a blue line, but over here, echoing in another canvas, the blue is more spare, operating more tightly, catching up and tethering some visual energy.
Like a joint, you stabilize a joint, like a little metal corner, a little key point, going on in that sense, or a turning point.
I find that very few things in a painting’s development are easy all the way through. I find myself loving a certain move, and then making a slight change, and then having to react to that: I may start in one way or direction, but then constantly, literally turning the canvas, I do a reverse move. I’ll turn it.
Nick Wilkinson’s Los Osos studio, photo by Christina McPhee
It looks as if you are using a lot of oil sticks right now. And I see how you are applying your oil sticks with force and then creating a general shape; and then, you’re refining the edges of these shapes on canvas with your precise, smaller brushes. Oil stick is for the big decisions?
Yes, in most instances.
So with the process of moving from oil stick to brush, you are still intent on drawing.
We all want there to be nuance, little moments, that’s what I’m trying to get at, so there might be a hard line here, or the nick of a brush there, and the trace of these moments look as if they are creating depth from within a really shallow field.
For at least the last two years, my paintings are kind of like weavings of shapes. Woven effects – that’s the thing I’m always coming back to. Within the weave, I look to fix an edge here, make another feel like it’s popping. Little moments. And the longer you stay with them, the longer those moments are revealed. There are two-second moments that catch your eye and there are five-minute moments, it’s a matter of pacing.
Conversations with several artists come to mind. One is the contemporary painter Stanley Whitney.
I love his work.
I’ve really enjoyed Stanley Whitney’s recent interviews on YouTube, especially with the Brooklyn Rail. Stanley, in a conversation with painter/critic Tom McGlynn, talks about how he understands drawing as a foundation for painting. He says: “I had to figure out what drawing meant to me – I wanted drawing as a really solid skeleton. So, when I get to these paintings, I know where I am in space, I don’t have to figure out where, I know where the color is immediately... then there is improvisation, through the color.”
Yes, for a long time I was suspicious, dismissive of a painter who makes the same painting a million different ways; but then, every time, it’s like – crack!
Whitney’s color shapes are especially revelatory as rhythms.
Yes, that’s definitely what I’m after.
It looks like you’re now entering into something so engrossing that you can’t see the end of it! You’re already going, oh yeah, wait, I gotta do this one, only now it’s going into a new field. Each painting becomes a new site for the same query.
Yes, sometimes I’m not clear at first where the painting needs to go and also OK with not understanding. But then, you do something you think is right and then you step back and you realize you were wrong; and then, you have to wait for a little while to let it tell you what to do again, or to go out on a limb and make a move made on that intuition.
Oh, so they obsess you when you’re not here.
Like a lot of other artists, I don’t have the luxury right now of a practice that’s eight hours a day.
You have to do it efficiently, get down to it.
I have a lot of things happening, and so when I come in here, I think that’s part of the reason these things have, kind of, found a bit more of a meditative space here.
Nick Wilkinson, Tight Knit, oil and colored pencil on canvas; Rougher Yet, oil on canvas, photos by Elliott Johnson
I’m imagining that endorphin hit we get in the pleasure of painting...
That’s true. I’ve surrounded myself with people, my businesses, plants that I love, people that I care about, projects that keep my mind moving. Doing a landscape, laying plants out, stepping back, is the same process essentially as doing these paintings. Yet in the studio, definitely, these moments are more meditative, more solo. Because the studio is at the grow zone, I can come in here and look and not necessarily make a move.
This is ideal.
I can come in, sit down, look, put a dab of blue to make a change and then run out.
It’s a growing space, so I can imagine these paintings are like little plots, slowly growing and proliferating. You’re keeping to a very strong reference, the plant life is cognate to what you live with every day.
They are like little groves.
You’re intensely tuned into the plots, site, place. Have you always worked in painting exclusively?
I got my undergrad degree in painting, but really, coming out of school, I was doing more installation, sculptural work, using found objects, industrial objects. I am a collector. I have collections of collections, I collect plants, I collect textiles, paintings, ceramics. I collect lots of oddball objects. I’m always picking up stuff and leaving it in the space to be able to react to it. Something too beautiful not to pick up.
Do you think it was a natural thing to start the gallery? You’re gathering new experiences – you seem to have maybe two thirds of the shows around painting practices.
Those are artists whose work I enjoy, whose work I think is happening.
You make sure that their work actually shows up. It’s in Brooklyn and now it’s here. And this has to do with one of your other principles about life, being surrounded by people who have common empathic ground, and share interests; and people come to you.
The gallery has become a place where like-minded people get together, it’s a place to connect, the allure of that. Trying to show work that I find to be valid is paramount.
It’s not a stress for me to have the gallery, I don’t have to make decisions based on sales only; it can be about other things, it can be about me feeling good about doing a show. It can be about giving an opportunity to someone who is making amazing things but is not getting opportunities to show the work as often, or just calling on someone I don’t know, because I want to see the work in person and show it.
Left Field Gallery also participates in greater LA now – seems like a three or four hour travel tolerance is not that different from driving from West LA to Laguna Beach at the wrong time! Left Field is part of that ecosystem.
I would like to think that. The nice thing about this, that I believe appeals to artists, especially from the other coast, and even from Los Angeles, is you are in a completely different world here. The sense of nature is so raw here.
Connecting and collecting: it sounds like you set out to be a collector for participatory and empathic reasons. You have a talent for nurturing community. What were things like for you as a child?
Nick Wilkinson’s palette, photo by Christina McPhee
I grew up the son of a farmer in El Centro, east of San Diego, along the Mexican border. My mom was always the more free-spirited one. She’s a nurse and a Reiki master, with silver bracelets up her arms. Between my parents, there was a duality in my experience. They, of course, got divorced. I didn’t grow up making art, but I always knew that the farm lifestyle and living in that area was not something I was interested in. But you can’t get away from yourself. I got a degree in art. My dad said, you’re never going to use that. So it all comes around!
I love that your mom is a nurse, you run a nursery, you’re nurturing. That’s really deep for you.
Where I grew up, there are rich farmers, but my family was not one of them. In school, there may have been art classes, but I wasn’t tuned into that at all. It wasn’t until my mom moved to Bend, Oregon with my stepdad, when I was fifteen years old, that I realized I could study art. I had this amazing teacher, her name was Mrs. Carvallo, and she nurtured it. I was good at it, and I found quickly in that art class that I loved this – I wanted to do this.
Then coming out of school, I decided to go into art, and my dad said, it’s a waste of money. My mom said, whatever you want, honey! I moved to San Diego. That’s where all my buddies moved. When you live in a little rural farming community you look at the mountains over on the way to San Diego and every morning or every evening, you know, it’s the Virgin Mary over there, waving at you. Cool breezes and the beach, and I don’t want to be here, it’s 120 degrees today. So, I went to San Diego State, and enjoyed my experience, and then, moved here (San Luis Obispo).
Getting back to your paintings, I’ve noticed you like to pop a red.
I’ve never thought much about the red. These are subtle color push and pulls. It’s cadmium red light here. Well, the important thing is, the color and the color shapes are not autonomous beings. Colors move from canvas to canvas. For instance, there’s a moment here, where up top, a blue-red-green shape appears, but then it’s also appearing in this smaller canvas. I’m pulling these events out of one painting into another painting.
You could call it a research method: to collect, then flow things together, then grow them into life.
Cover Image: Nick Wilkinson, Wlee, oil and colored pencil on canvas, photo by Elliott Johnson
