Nick Kraft
Nick Kraft’s work is deeply and directly influenced by the people and life events surrounding him. Funerals, birthdays, sporting events, are strong catalysts for memorializing or celebrating through painting. His process starts with the surface of the painting laid flat on the table and starting on the edge. He then slowly works his way around the image adding forms in a linear spiral path until stopping in the center. Nick’s work relies on vibrant colors, shapes, brush strokes and detailed patterns. Through the process, other artists in the studio can collaborate on small areas in this progression. He does not paint to represent one particular idea, but rather to encourage others to be comfortable feeling vulnerable while expressing themselves. Nick’s openness to collaboration and change in color palate have pushed this new body of work into wonderful meditations and collections of moments in the studio.
Transcription of Audio Interview with Nick Kraft
Nick: “Everything that I paint comes from my, I don’t write nothin’ down. The design comes from my head to here. And I use Stencils to come up with the design. And then, like a year ago, I thought of to use Q-Tips. I was born with Cerebral Palsy and sometimes I have a spasm. It’s like her, she has a lot of challenges, I have the same. Like, I’ll be in the store with one of my friends, people just stare at me and I’m like “haven’t you seen a person in a wheelchair before? And, that’s kind of, it kind of hurts me, when people stare. If they had a question, I wish they would ask me before they stare. I’m like, it challenges me everytime I’m in a wheelchair, it’s just, It’s just how I get around.”
Britni (Interviewer): "And then, what do you want people to get when they look at this painting? Like, how do you want people to feel when they’re looking at this painting?”
Nick: “Happy, not sad.”
Transcription of image description for Nick Kraft:
This painting was created by Nick Kraft. It is entitled “tremor composition” and is made with acrylic and marker on canvas. The canvas is unframed, and is thirty-six inches wide and 24 inches tall, shaped like a rectangle. The entire surface is covered with dabs of bright, colorful paint, each about the size and shape of the end of a pencil eraser. In fact, the artist used a q-tip dipped in paint to create these dabs. Underneath the paint we see faint but straight pencil lines criss-crossing the canvas. Some lines move from the bottom left up to the center, and others move from the bottom right up to the center, while others go straight up and down, and others still go from the bottom center to the upper right. Each line is an average of a few inches apart, but they do criss-cross as they move across the canvas, creating small angular shapes. The artist has filled in each of these shapes with different colors of paint dabs. in one of the angular shapes on the top left hand corner we see a mixture of bright red and yellow dabs, and then the shape to the right is filled with bright blue dabs, while the shape next to that is filled with bright green dabs. Below this the artist has continued to fill the shapes with dabs of the same colors of red, blue, and green, but they are lighter in some of the shapes, almost as if the paint on the artist’s q-tip was running dry. As we move to the bottom center of the painting there is a large angular shape filled with deep purple dabs. To the right of that shape there is another angular shape colored bright red and yellow. On the far right of the painting there is a triangular shape filled with magenta paint, but this is the only place on the painting that has been painted with a brush rather than with dabs of paint. The smooth brush strokes are visible through the paint’s texture and create contrast with the rest of the painting because the paint is laid on the paper in lines rather than dabs. The overall effect of the abstract approach to the painting is colorful and lively, and one could imagine various images coming out of the abstraction – a mountain range with a flag flying at the peak, or a kite flying over a field of flowers, for example.