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Kenneth Nicholson
262 Plays2 years ago
Born in Latrobe Pennsylvania, Kenneth Nicholson received his AFA from Westmoreland County Community College in 2010, BFA from Seton Hill University in 2014, and MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2016. He currently teaches as an adjunct instructor at University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Seton Hill University, and Westmoreland County Community College. His work has been exhibited in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Ohio, Washington DC, New Jersey, and New York.
Follow Kenneth's works in progress on Instagram @grosssferatu
Check out the finished pieces at https://kennethnicholsonart.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:03
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host, Ken Zalante. Editor and producer, Peter Bauer.
00:00:18
Speaker
This is Ken Vellante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast, and you'll hear it in my voice throughout the show. I am excited to talk to Kenneth Nicholson, quite the painter, and I'll tell you right off the bat, thinker. And we're gonna talk a little bit about film, a little bit about music, a bunch about painting and art. Kenneth,
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome to the Something Rather than Nothing podcast. Thank you very much for having me. Quite, quite the pleasure.
Early Artistic Influences
00:00:51
Speaker
I wanted to ask you right off the bat, you've done various things around the arts, you teach, you paint, all that type of thing. When did you see yourself as an artist? It was the type of thing like, hey, you know, when you're a little kid or something happened one day where you're like, this is who I am.
00:01:10
Speaker
Oh, I think it was it was definitely early on I think gravitating towards a drawing my parents used to Buy me Magna doodles, which I'm not even sure is a thing anymore, but I used to wear they are I hope they were like Awesome, and I think as a kid Kind of like getting into that
00:01:34
Speaker
groove of not only being interested in art, but then I think over the years as I started growing up, kind of coming to this realization that it was like one of the things that I was actually invested in. And if I wanted to
00:01:53
Speaker
kind of move outside of a regular nine to five, which made me really miserable for like a lot of my twenties and whatnot. Then I kind of had to find a way to kind of embrace like those skills or those interests that I had been involved with since I was younger.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
Exploring Art Style and Themes
00:02:18
Speaker
And, um, I, I think that there's, since there's a bunch of things to talk to you about art wise, but I just wanted to kind of give you like, um, in, in, I won't be able to describe this particularly well, but I'm going to give it a shot. Um, in your paintings, uh, uh, uh,
00:02:34
Speaker
They're amazing paintings, but one of the main things for me as a thinker that I love about them is that there's these pieces and there's this tone and it provokes thought immediately about bodies and space.
00:02:54
Speaker
It's just immediate the feeling of the room the feeling of the amount of light that's in there and I'm just pulled pulled right in I know when you're talking about Your art I've heard you talk about your art a bit in about the notion of of bodies in some aspects of displacement
00:03:19
Speaker
Can you describe what you're trying to do with your paintings or am I on target about how you're playing with bodies?
00:03:32
Speaker
No, absolutely. You, you had a podcast episode, a few, a few episodes back with someone. And one of the first things that you were talking about with the artist and the name's escaping me was this idea of burnout.
Overcoming Burnout and Rediscovering Art
00:03:47
Speaker
And from that, I, how Susie Deville might've been Susie Deville from that kind of sense of burnout was a great deal of like possibility and kind of creativity came from that. When I, I've always been interested in, in the figure.
00:04:03
Speaker
but as it I think starts for a lot of people kind of in that traditional sense of like the tableau and kind of working from life working from different kind of like setting up different situations or
00:04:20
Speaker
images and that's how I worked for the longest time I think throughout graduate school and even though I always kind of moved into maybe more like melodramatic or maybe more um kind of expressive areas I after graduate school found that I was becoming like really really burnt out with that type of painting which was like really jarring for me because it was kind of like the one style of art that I always found
00:04:50
Speaker
spoke to me the most. And now it wasn't really speaking to me at all after I've just finished an extra two years of school. So I started to kind of indulge in the things that I was just interested in outside of what was considered like
00:05:08
Speaker
I guess professional art making or like academic art making that I'd kind of dive back into the different films that I loved or how I would kind of collect different like album covers or be interested in things like
00:05:24
Speaker
Anatomy or old medical most excited you were most excited by those things like you went back towards like whether it's the album cover in the movies Like that that was your zone, right? Absolutely I think that zone is like really important that it was like kind of just going back to what I enjoyed for the simple fact that I enjoyed it Yes, really no thesis behind it or anything like that and then as I kind of just steeped myself back in that kind of
00:05:53
Speaker
subject matter or those images, I started kind of working with these ideas of collage. A lot of times like I was teaching about like burrows and the cut-up method in the experimental film courses that I had and I found that was like such a great way to introduce play back into my studio practice because it was gone for the longest time. Studio like working in the studio
00:06:21
Speaker
Became like a big like a hassle and that's like the worst I think for I think in terms of like killing Creativity or turning painting into the job that I didn't want in the first place so dealing with those different ideas finding ways to introduce The absurd or taking all of these kind of disparate elements of the body especially but finding ways to
00:06:51
Speaker
combine different elements that might not make sense like on paper or if you're kind of like introducing the ideas.
00:06:59
Speaker
um in terms of like trying to explain what is going on in the image but as you what I think means a lot to me is as you've said about like looking at the image and taking a bit of time with it uh some of those different rabbit holes almost seem to open up in terms of different like associations or suggestions by the kind of collision of two
Music's Impact on Art
00:07:21
Speaker
different limbs or different elements of the body and I found that really reignited how I approached painting and just making art in general. We had talked a little bit I think over email about how like different forms of art
00:07:44
Speaker
influenced. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Music. I was, I was going to yell as a couple of times talking, I was going to yell at him like, what, what, uh, what music's in the background? What's in music's in the background painting. I heard an interview with you Kenneth, I gotta tell you. Um,
00:07:59
Speaker
You mentioned, uh, Mr. Bungle. Oh, good Lord. And what I love about Mr. Bungle, my name's Ken Vellante. They have an album, Disco Vellante. So, hey, I love Mr. Bungle to begin with, Faith No More. I got to tell you one thing about Mr. Bungle. I was at a show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a place called The Rave, and they opened up this weird basement area. It had three stages. The place was enormous. And they opened up this.
00:08:24
Speaker
downstairs, which I'll just say out loud, I think wasn't proper or under regulation or legal or anything. And Mr. Bungle played in August in that basement. A wild show, of course. I will tell you, without any exaggeration, I believe the temperature in that place was at least 100 to 110 degrees inside.
00:08:49
Speaker
And so anytime I've talked to anybody about Mr. Bungle or shows of Mr. Bungle, I hear the wildest things. So anyways, not to throw all that Mr. Bungle in there, but yeah, talk about the music. Talk about what you're thinking about the music and what you inhabit or what's there.
00:09:07
Speaker
What a perfect way to listen to that music where you're in an almost fever state. I think what that has to kind of like induce, for me, Mr. Bungle was like one of my first introductions to jazz, whether or not I knew it at the time. It was like a kind of jazz fusion take before I was really introduced to jazz at all. So for me, Mr. Bungle was such a great
00:09:35
Speaker
introduction to experimental music making and the avant-garde music making approaches. But there was one on the first song on their first full-length album, the song, quote, unquote, which was called Travolta, which I think threatened to sue them.
00:09:56
Speaker
I listened to that song so many times and I loved it. And then I was going through the lyrics and there's the all behold the spectacle of fleshly, fleshy limbless rectangle. And this story basically just about this person, like lacking limbs and without eyesight and without hearing and how this individual is trying to communicate to you through the song or communicate to these people. It was just like,
00:10:25
Speaker
the time all these different aspects of like Cronenberg and this kind of like theatrical atmosphere that I just never I had never heard before and it was just me kind of going through the rabbit hole of listening to all the faith no more that I could so try to find some more Mike Patton things that would be due to me and I think that
00:10:50
Speaker
that line especially has stuck out with me as I've been doing so much work. I have a show coming up, still getting down the dates between either January or February at Stopwatch Gallery in Greensburg. The title that kind of keeps ringing true is fleshy, limb filled rectangles because as I've been working and kind of like creating this series of
00:11:17
Speaker
Sometimes I'll call them just like my limb paintings. That's kind of the ideal, is to have like a gallery or a space filled with these fleshy limb filled rectangles.
00:11:30
Speaker
Wow. Yeah, I heard that quote and I love how you talk about it. It immediately made me think, just in my unique experience, one more bit about the Mr. Bungle cover of their first album. The reason why it stuck out to me at that time, I was pretty obsessed with the comic series called Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children.
00:11:59
Speaker
And that independent series was kind of like wild stories and simple drawings and paintings within it, kind of almost
Art as Expression and Healing
00:12:09
Speaker
like a small comic book picture book type of thing and bizarre stories. And the artists who did that did their first cover there. So I was actually drawn visually to Mr. Bungle not knowing what it was from comic books. It's just a weird little weird little thing there.
00:12:28
Speaker
But I think, man, that's also one of my favorite things about kind of going through the rabbit hole of like a certain
00:12:37
Speaker
obsession or like a certain thing that you're interested in and kind of going back to feeling burnout in my studio practice. That's what I was kind of looking for again, like where you find like a certain artist or like a comic series or like a set of album covers. For me, growing up,
00:13:00
Speaker
It was so different at the time. So growing up in the 90s and the 2000s, where going and physically getting a CD or an album, the cover art meant so much more. Because you were much more inclined, I think, to buy an album based off of nothing else but the image that was calling out to you. And there was a band called Carcass.
00:13:29
Speaker
that I loved. And it was through those album covers that seem they were just basically collages of medical textbook images. Yeah, yeah. And if like down like at the local mall, like you could get the album, but usually had like a slipcover of something else. You could see the other like cover underneath of it. So it was like,
00:13:55
Speaker
How enticing is that to kind of see like the different elements of the whole band is basically making up lyrics that are just kind of cut and paste almost like Dada poems. Just medical terminology like listen to them talk about their albums they would sometimes argue about what the song was about because no one really.
00:14:19
Speaker
knew. The lyrics didn't, weren't really kind of pointing to anything specific, but each member of the band had a different idea of what the album, I think though the one album, Necrotism, discounting the Encellurebus or something.
00:14:36
Speaker
It's just I watched the drummer and the singer kind of argue about what that meant. They for the 20 years had a different idea. That's not what you told me it meant when we when we were drinking that whiskey that night. You said it meant something else. I think that kind of like detachment from there having to be a one particular reading of this or that still that like element of play that they were very interested
00:15:05
Speaker
this kind of like subversive imagery and kind of like subject matter for what they were working on and that was like the the fuel for what they were doing yeah and I always kind of like going back to those yeah and I appreciate you mentioned the covers I had the experience just recently
00:15:29
Speaker
with with my son and it was kind of like interacting with you said like the physical media have one of my vehicles just as CDs and I like it that I can just use CDs there because I still use my CDs for that vehicle
00:15:42
Speaker
He's he's a polite young man. He says PFP, which is porno for pyros. I always just said porno for pyros, but it's more proper say PFP. And he was able to see the dang thing that I got 30 years ago, like, you know, the, you know, just like albums or something, you know, where you get the.
00:16:00
Speaker
the yard on the front and he's just looking at it. He says, this is like the regular one. Yeah. When it first came out, this is what it was. And it was just, it was kind of enraptured by it. And I'm like, wow, that's a, you know, I'm just watching it. You know, it's pretty cool. It's so different to hold it to like sit and to like come home.
00:16:21
Speaker
for the first time holding like Iron Maiden's Killers or like the first Danzig album. I used to kind of just sit and look at the cover of it, kind of that graphic kind of like demon, kind of like almost like a print. I'm not even really sure. Yeah, I know it's just black and white. Yeah. Yeah. And for me, it was just like, that's what used to fuel my art making. Before it was like,
00:16:51
Speaker
a job or like homework. It was just kind of sitting and seeing if I could like reproduce one of those images. And I think that's really easy to forget, like why we get into like work. You had, you had asked me like the email about like, when did I see myself as an artist? And then just like you kind of keep going, like unfolding back through the years and thinking about all the different
00:17:19
Speaker
just experiences of kind of being immersed in art making. Yeah, when were you an artist and what you were doing or you didn't see yourself but you were and what you were doing and that reflective piece. Speaking of reflection, I need to hit you with a big question, speaking with Kenneth Nicholson here and the question for him is what is art?
00:17:46
Speaker
This comes up a bunch. So I teach a lot of college courses, but when I'm teaching 2D design or drawing or painting one, this comes up quite a bit in terms of trying to, especially within 2D design, for so much of what we're doing is related to problem solving and trying to have them really cultivate certain critical thinking skills.
00:18:10
Speaker
I think art at its base core like the starting point is this way of self-expression and I think that's something that we can all agree with within the class but for me what's important is finding or what's more helpful I guess for me is finding other
00:18:35
Speaker
reasons for making art or kind of even going a little bit further. The last podcast you had last episode was talking about ways to heal and art as like a kind of healing mechanism. And I think that's becoming more and more important as we've become like so much more attuned to talking about things like mental health. And for me, like drawing as a way to
00:19:04
Speaker
either calm down, or kind of zone out, which is itself I think like a way of healing. Yeah, yeah, kind of like dissociation that for me was like really a lot of times when I found myself kind of just drawing almost compulsively. But as I kind of like work my way through, like,
00:19:24
Speaker
teaching and finding different ways to kind of incorporate art into my career. I think art is a great vehicle for problem solving and making decisions and kind of taking those elements of self-reflection and finding a way to utilize them like an everyday life. Yeah, I've heard the expression at times and I picked up when you said as far as problem solving, which sounds just
00:19:53
Speaker
not as stimulating because you don't think you're solving problems, but all the different ways you are reconciling and or healing or solving problems, whether it's whether it's compulsion to do to go into that activity for this amount of time to get it out or whether it's to go through the process and inhabit it more and more slowly, however you do it. I think that's what's exciting
00:20:21
Speaker
to me about art and where I've learned about over the years not having formal training so much within the arts but just self-study in conversations with artists. We talked a bit about art in context and various ways in terms of healing and its role in kind of helping us as humans
Art's Role During the Pandemic
00:20:48
Speaker
but
00:20:48
Speaker
I want to ask about the role of art. What do you think the role of art is for us and has it changed? If the world feels different in 2022 right now, has the role of art changed in your opinion? Oh, absolutely. I think the role of art
00:21:07
Speaker
throughout history always seems to change, whether it be artists as communicator or artists as storyteller, artists as shaman, artists as craftsperson. And then as we kind of like go through all of these different like unfoldings or other machinations, I'm not sure at the moment like what the role of the artist is in terms of having just like one
00:21:33
Speaker
singular purpose. I think one of the interesting things about looking at art currently is how absolutely scattered the definition is and how gray and blurred some of the lines have become, which for me makes it all the more exciting when we kind of see that fine art, graphic design, art therapy, media,
00:22:05
Speaker
social media, especially like, man, there's, I think, more than ever before, way, way fewer distinctions between what counts as what. And I think that's really disturbing. When I like, which makes sense. But I also think it's nothing new. I think as times develop, the role of the artist always has to either also develop or keep up
00:22:34
Speaker
mutate with it. And I think if like the role of the artist is really slippery or kind of like fuzzy, I think that says a lot about the time. Yeah.
00:22:48
Speaker
One of the things that I've heard so much over the last couple of years is how, especially throughout the pandemic, the arts have been kind of gutted financially in terms of budgets in a lot of schools and a lot of places. But one of the things that helped keep us sane throughout the pandemic was the arts. That was one of the things in terms of recreating works from museums and posting those or kind of
00:23:16
Speaker
zoning out to films or TV shows, there's this kind of like dual, there's like a dependency we have on art and this lack of wanting to respect it as being as it is for all of us. So yeah, I think if there if there was one particular role that artists play at the moment, I'm not I'm not exactly sure what that even would
00:23:47
Speaker
be in terms of like a definition? Well, but I think I heard what you're saying, which I think brings an important dynamic is that the, you know, the role, you know, might reflecting the times or what needs there are from people and what their relationship is with creativity and art as a culture. You know, if it's celebrated in forefront, then it's going to feel different than when you have to fight for your space, you know, no matter what.
Analyzing 'The Thing' and Visual Media in Art
00:24:13
Speaker
So where it stands in culture, hey,
00:24:15
Speaker
Before I ask you why there's something rather than nothing have a different thing question I'm a huge huge fan of the movie the thing and I've heard you talk about it and Maybe the question is Why is the thing so great? Why is John Carpenter's the thing? so great of a movie and I think there are a lot of reasons why that movie is so for me memorable and
00:24:45
Speaker
And so wonderful as we kind of one of the things that seems to always come up when people Talk about why there hasn't been another movie like the thing in so long I think when we listen to like the commentary for that film Which I always have film commentaries going on in the background of the studio because more so than music like podcasts and commentaries helped me kind of
00:25:11
Speaker
drift off into whatever I'm doing much more easily. But throughout that film, they really didn't have a lot of like supervision. I think there was like a lot of like dangerous like workplace situations with effects. And just like no one really was I don't think really managing them because of
00:25:36
Speaker
locations of where they were. I also think just with John Carpenter, he was always open to I think chasing his own inspirations in terms of the films that he loved, and the kind of experience in the movies that he wanted to make. If you watch a lot of like, there's a really wonderful interview on YouTube somewhere of Cronenberg, John Carpenter, and
00:26:07
Speaker
Uh, the director that did American werewolf in London for some reason I'm Landis. Yeah, absolutely. So it's so interesting to see carpenters kind of own perspective at around that time of like what experience he wanted for the audience. And it always seems like he wanted something that was just out of grasp.
00:26:31
Speaker
And I think that's why in that period of time, those movies of his were so inventive because he was ambitious not in terms of like being popular. He wasn't really ambitious in terms of like, let's make the most amount of money. But with those, like, especially an earlier set of films of his, it was just this kind of like ambition to make a film that for him kind of like,
00:26:56
Speaker
Stacked up to his ideals of what a great film should be and he kind of chased that dragon throughout that whole period of time I think with the thing he also had a lot of people that he Kind of gave creative Leeway to and I think that kind of helped everything kind of blossom all the more you have all these wonderful actors from what I remember this special effects department were fairly like
00:27:27
Speaker
newcomers in a way that had a lot to prove and I If i'm remembering that correctly. It's so it's like you get this sense of all this Possibility that potential potential. Absolutely. Yeah art art like art studio potential in spots
00:27:45
Speaker
It's like the first week of like a new school and the semester starts and it's kind of like a, there's like an electricity, like in the air because everyone's kind of like excited to get started. That's the one thing, that's what I think of why that movie's, I think the subject matter is,
00:28:07
Speaker
always going to be intriguing. I think how it kind of throughout time, we've thought of that movie as meaning or like state being a stand in for different things like whether like different diseases or Yeah, like virus or impostors or body switching. It's something that you can always kind of find a way to to kind of connect to like
00:28:38
Speaker
current events somehow. Somehow with that movie for as kind of outlandish and as sci-fi as it is, it's still so rooted in things like paranoia, which never go away. We always feel like as a society or group of societies to kind of just be at odds with
00:28:59
Speaker
the what ifs of kind of like working with each other. And that movie, for as many times as I see it, it's just like an incredibly fun ride in being incredibly uncomfortable at the same time. Yeah, I love that. What a great description.
00:29:17
Speaker
And, you know, it's kind of capturing the energy around it. Hey, everybody, Kenneth Nicholson on the thing on something rather than nothing. Speaking of which, moving to the next question. Kenneth, why? I ask it now, why is there something around nothing? But it's come up to where people wanted to ask, how is there something rather than nothing? I give you either one of those, which I don't know if I've done before for approach, but what's the deal? I would say.
00:29:49
Speaker
Why there's something rather than nothing? Because there's possibility when we have something. There's like more room to have options. I think one of the things that I kind of talk about
00:30:04
Speaker
in class is like when we go throughout history and kind of like learn from other art movements or learn from other artists, we see that like they oftentimes have these choices on having like a kind of creative reaction to something versus like a destructive reaction to something. When we're talking about the Bauhaus in my 2D design class, I'd say what made them so
00:30:35
Speaker
dangerous at the time and why they were shut down was because they were making creative choices to kind of move forward with what they were kind of being like the kind of cards that they were given at the time. And I think if you choose the creative option, that is always going to give you more to work with when you have something rather than nothing, then
00:31:04
Speaker
there is a sense of possibility and I think that's better than anything to actually have an option of two different directions to move from
00:31:20
Speaker
That's ideal. Yeah, I really appreciate that. And certainly, certainly thought provoking. I find that the answers I've been thinking about in terms when we're talking about art and creativity, which is a different context for asking this question really kind of digs into creativity and something in how we form things for others, you know, fundamentally and
00:31:49
Speaker
Man, I really enjoyed talking with you, but before we let you go, Kenneth, tell the listeners where they find your work. Like I said, your marvelous paintings, everybody, go see for yourself. Tell them how they do that, Kenneth.
00:32:07
Speaker
Thank you very much. I am most active on Instagram, the username grossferatu with three S's. You can find my artwork on Kenneth Nicholson art.com on Instagram. It's mostly works in progress and things like that. But the finished pieces always end up on the website.
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah. Hey, just been just been a great pleasure to talk to you about, you know, a few different things. And I can see where when we're talking about. And I'd love to talk to you again, just the pieces where, you know, where the arts slip in from one form to the other, you know, and I really picked up on what you're saying about as far as how, you know, seeing album covers. I think some about I might have
00:32:57
Speaker
Indulge myself in the same area very much with comic books in sequence and comic book covers. And when you were talking about the records, which I love records as well, um, I realized there's so much overlap in thinking about what the visual presentation of that audio thing is with an album. So I love that. It's an oddly lost art. I think like we get, we get DVD covers and we have album art.
00:33:27
Speaker
I don't think it carries the same weight for who picks up the art as it used to. I think video stores are always something I think back to being so
00:33:46
Speaker
always feeling like incredibly safe and like a video store or like a rental shop as well. And I like those places don't really exist in the same capacity as they as they used to. Yeah. Yeah. I I it's it's it's it's a great it's a great topic and I and I have enjoyed talking to Kenneth.
00:34:11
Speaker
Great pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for your art. And everybody check out Kenneth's art. If you haven't seen the thing, go watch the thing. We're recording this in October. October is a great month to watch the thing. Beautiful stories for ugly children. If you can find those out of print copies, your Mr. Bongos, everything. So thank you, Kenneth. And I hope to chat with you again soon. Thank you very much for having me.
00:34:40
Speaker
Alright, take care. This is something rather than nothing.