[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today we're meeting up with artist and musician Nathaniel
Russell.
He's originally from Indianapolis,
spent a long time in the San Francisco Bay Area,
and only recently moved back here.
Drawing is really at the core of everything Nathaniel does.
Making prints, posters, zines, paintings, murals, and books,
among other things.
And his style is often deceptively simple.
Pairing line drawing and text in a way that's often very funny,
but is also able to conjure other worlds
and re-imagine our own.
He's made flyers for events that don't exist,
and sculptures of books never published.
But he also make posters for events that do exist,
and art for real album covers.
It's that back and forth between real
and imagined that gives Nathaniel's works
tremendous resonance.
And you're just as likely to encounter Nathaniel's work out
in the world, on a t-shirt or tacked to a telephone pole,
as you are in a gallery.
And today he's going to give us an assignment that
asks you to put your work out in the world too.
Hi.
I'm Nathaniel Russell.
And this is your art assignment.
I really do love commercial work.
There's a lot of things in my life
that I've seen that has a commercial application,
whether it's a record cover, a book
cover, or a box of popcorn, or product design,
or something like that that has affected me and stuck with me
my entire life, much more so than a Marc Chagall painting.
Which, I love Marc Chagall.
And I love a lot of classic, wonderful modern art.
You know.
But I want to make all that stuff, you know?
I want to make a good painting.
I want to make a box of popcorn.
I want to write a book.
I want to make a flyer.
I feel like I want to do all of those things,
because I love all those things, and I get something out
of all of those things.
NATHANIEL (VOICEOVER): I would try to make something everyday.
And get these little ideas out of the sketchbook,
out of my head, just to make it real and move on.
And one of these things I had a couple ideas for some fliers
that I just thought would be funny to come across.
There was one I did, it was a portrait of this poodle.
This fluffy, French poodle-y looking little fancy boy.
I sort of saw him as a leader of the resistance,
in a way, of this dog versus owner.
I thought it was just really funny.
And I just wanted to make it.
So I would make some every morning.
And then it sort of veered off into just from a joke
into these more abstract ideas of how
I feel about the Earth and my connection
to it and other people, and how to communicate
with other people, or communicate these ideas,
in a way that's kind of more casual.
And it's not about, I made this painting.
I worked six months on it.
Where you need to really appreciate this and give me
$5,000 for this painting.
It's like, I just went and drew this.
And I put a photo on it.
And I'm gonna go Xerox it.
And I'm gonna put it up on this pole,
or I'm gonna email it to you.
Your assignment is to make a flyer that gives advice,
shares something about your everyday life,
or promotes an imagined event.
Go out into the world and put it up
on a light pole, or a bulletin board,
or wherever you see fliers.
Send us a printable copy.
And bonus points if you have photos of your flyer
out in the real world.
So Sara, as you know, one of my favorite things
is the fake protest sign.
Oh, yes.
Like there's a bunch of angry placards.
And there's one person holding up a sign that says,
Obama Bring Back Arrested Development.
Or What Do We Want?
Time Travel.
When Do We Want It?
That's Irrelevant.
I actually think that's a really good precedent, John.
Because like there's an example of being surrounded by signs
that want something from you.
They want to sway your opinion.
Or they want your vote.
And then you insert this message that doesn't really
want anything from you.
That's kind of playing with that genre.
Yeah.
It's like a gift instead of a solicitation.
And in this image-drenched culture,
most of the images that we see are asking something of us.
And I really like this assignment
because it's about like making a gift for people.
Right.
And what a wonderful metaphor for art in general.
Right?
An image that isn't asking you for money except that
are costs money sometimes.
But let's say if you're in a museum-- except admission.
Um.
Maybe this isn't so good.
Oh, there's no way out of this capitalistic society.
So aside from Obama Bring Back Arrested Development,
there are some other precedents for this activity.
Like Nat is very much influenced by wood
cut artists like Antonio Frasconi, and Ben Shahn.
But I think the Bay Area history,
the history of the Mission School,
is very much palpable in his work.
And that's what I'd like to talk about today.
SARA (VOICEOVER): Nat remembers walking past a closed
gallery in New York, and seeing through the glass
a huge 20-foot mural that completely blew him away.
It was by Margaret Kilgallen, who had painted the gallery
floor-to-ceiling with her signature
assemblage of storefront lettering
and cartoon-like images of mostly women.
Kilgallen was based in San Francisco,
and was inspired by the signage on the streets of the Mission
District where she lived and was associated
with a loose group of artists who
came up in the '90s, referred to as the Mission School.
She painted hundreds of murals around the city,
mixing surplus paint from recycling centers,
and bringing together the influence
of folk art, graffiti, traditional mural painting,
and underground comics.
Kilgallen's work was shown in galleries,
but mostly lived out in the world.
Nat was struck by the complex emotions and textures that came
through in her flat shapes.
He was influenced by Kilgallen's approach,
but found his own visual and material
language that also values the personal and handmade,
celebrates the power of the line, and lives
with us out in the world.
I say fake flyer.
But it's a real thing.
I put it up and it's a flyer.
It's real.
But these things that I'm advertising or promoting
or writing up, they're fake because you
can't come to my garage.
The garage sale isn't real.
The fundraiser isn't real.
It's about this the idea is way more
important than the reality of it existing in a physical realm.
NATHANIEL (VOICEOVER): The number one thing for me
about this is just getting people
out of the digital un-real life, and back
into the physical world.
There's not a lot of just lurking going on anymore.
There's not a lot of people just loitering anymore.
People are like walking to somewhere, or going over here,
or they're hanging out on the corner
and checking their phone until the crosswalk changes,
so they can keep going.
If they're even walking.
You know?
So I just made a batch of these flyers
for this event in Seattle.
And I did a couple.
But I just put like, Analog Twitter.
And I just wrote like, had breakfast this morning.
It was OK.
LOL.
Whatever.
And like a picture of a hot dog or something.
You know?
And just putting it up, because to me,
that's what you're doing with Twitter and Instagram
and everything.
It's like, look at my dog, you know.
Earth.
You know?
But to actually go through the idea of,
I'm gonna go to the coffee shop and print this out.
That level of perspective that you're giving people
on your life, like you're willingly, like, check it out.
This is what I want the world to see.
Anyone with a computer.
It's funny to think about on a local level.
And like, really isolated and see that perspective
as wonder what ol' Linda over here had for lunch.
I think I'm gonna walk down to the light pole
and see how that tuna casserole turned out.
Hopefully it will get you to think
about some ideas in different ways,
and get you out of the house, and make
you brave enough to try to put these ideas out
in the world for other people to see.
And just do it and move on, and see what happens.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Friends and I always talked about this band
that we were gonna have.
But we never-- two of them aren't even musicians.
And we would just pretend that we had this band.
And we'd tell people we had this band.
It even got written up in the school paper
as a high school band.
And I remember I made t-shirts for a band one time.
It was called Dolomite Jr.
[MUSIC PLAYING]