Today we’d like to introduce you to Nick Stull.
Hi Nick, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
Growing up I enjoyed making art, but it wasn’t until college that I fell in love with painting, color theory, and art history. I got my BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University with a concentration in painting, drawing, and sculpture.
Soon after college, I joined forces with a couple of friends and started an art gallery called 83 Gallery. Centrally located in the Short North Art District, our gallery soon became a popular fixture of the Columbus, OH arts community and was a thriving focal point for creative collaboration, enormous group exhibitions, and other wild art-related events and spectacles. During this time I was also an art director at the Mac Worthington Gallery. Through the combination of these experiences, I gained a lot of experience in arts management while also working closely with numerous artists, musicians, and other creative collaborators. After about 5 years, we decided to close up shop so that we could pursue other endeavors.
Shortly after the gallery, I became an exhibit designer at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. For the next 6 years, I worked closely with internationally recognized artists, curators, and partnering institutions to design, develop, and install contemporary exhibitions. This experience taught me a ton of useful & practical information, from using architectural software to develop 3-D designs & mock-ups to learning various types of buildings and fabrications as needed for each exhibit. Because the Wexner Center focused on contemporary art & installation, each show would be wildly different from the last, and with that, it would bring new and exciting challenges and obstacles to solve.
While owning a gallery and working at an art museum, I continued to do my own studio work that focused on experimental portraiture and figurative painting. Working closely with artists at a gallery & museum level provided a ton of inspiration that would help to inform my own practice. I began working with a number of art centers and galleries and exhibited my artwork locally, regionally, and nationally. I also began doing murals, sign painting, and branding & design projects during this time and collaborated with a number of businesses & organizations.
My own artwork started to gain enough traction and recognition to the point where I was able to quit my day job at the art museum and pursue my own work full-time. In November of 2021, I started a company called Day Blink Creative LLC, which specializes in large-scale murals, fine art, and branding & design. I am also represented by the Sarah Gormley Gallery in Columbus and had my first solo show with Sarah in March of 2022.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has not been an entirely smooth road, but it certainly has been a fun and exciting one and I would not change a thing. Along with various successes, there have also been countless small & large failures. But that comes with the territory, and through any difficulties, I have always maintained a love and fascination with exploring different facets of the art & design world(s) and drawing connections and ideas from a variety of sources.
Not to sound cliche, but art is such a subjective, non-definitive, and constantly evolving thing, and it is exciting to continue to pursue the idea of making sense of it, while still knowing that the process of exploration itself is paramount, and an actual answer will always change over time, or never be found.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
The core of my personal work is experimental portraiture and figurative painting. In my current series of paintings, I am interested in constructing a portrait composite that conveys the conflicting paradoxes that make up the human psyche. I am drawn to the adage “being an adult means having the ability to hold two contradicting thoughts at once.” Cognitive dissonance is a common, necessary experience of the human condition, as we try to navigate the complexities of the world we live in.
To express this notion, I approach these paintings by combining a number of disparate styles and methods of applying paint. Some areas are meticulous and rigid, while others are gestural and organic. Some areas are realistic and representational, while others are abstract and expressive. Some areas are pre-planned, while others are impulsive. I start with a basic color scheme and imagery that I would like to use, then add numerous layers until I feel there is a balance between the whole and the sum of its complex parts.
Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
I owe so much credit to my wife, Liz Morrison. Liz is an amazing artist and creates incredibly meticulous and inventive paintings and drawings that cover a wide range of subject matter. She is also an accomplished writer and poet, and language also plays a large conceptual role in some of her work. Not only has Liz collaborated with me on a number of murals, exhibits, and art projects, but she has been so supportive of my business and has helped with the financial and administrative side of things (did I mention she also owns a bookkeeping firm called Script & Ledger?!).
I would also like to thank my good friend, Andrew Kern. Andrew is a very successful artist in Columbus, OH, and owns a design firm called Flat Black Commercial Visuals. He taught me so much about mural making, design aesthetics, and the general process of scaling an image up and using the right tools and tricks to make it as clean and professional as possible.
Contact Info:
- Website: nickstull.com
- Instagram: @nick_stull_art
Image Credits
Abby Kamagate and Alie Skowronski
