Craig Paul Nowak

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Thursday, December 06, 2007

Artist Statement

I’m an artist in the most basic sense of the word; I pride myself on creating. In fact, I can’t think of a single aspect of my life that isn’t in some way related back to my art. And it’s not all about me; it’s about life in general, the life of all living things; it’s about unified harmony and attunement with the world around us, inside and out. I paint to show my audience what they most often take for granted, that which can not be seen, only felt. And in doing this, I must remain open to infinite possibilities because with limitations comes slow yet immanent demise. Just as well, the use of a single method and medium remains an insufficient means of discussing a complex binary such as that of yin and yang, or in this case, the connection between a man’s soul and the man himself.

Heady Art

Written by: Glen Mannisto (Art Critic)
Published in: Metrotimes; Detroit 7/11/2007

Among the obsessively searching self-portraits in Craig Paul Nowak's engaging solo show at Ferndale's Next Step Gallery, one may typify all that he's about as an artist and person. As if floating over us in an impressive athletic leap, or perhaps floating in existential ether as he searches for his identity, Nowak depicts himself lit from within. His face beams with a Renaissance-like angelic light. His tawdry, white "wifebeater" T-shirt may stereotypically signify a tie to working-class origins, but his emancipated flight joyously shrieks of a quest to answer big questions, posed in his artist's statement:

"I was interested in the self/self relationship (the physical versus the spiritual and emotional) because I didn't understand it. Who am I? What is my purpose? Where did I come from? Would the world be the same without me?

How is it possible that I am alive?"

Like his unpretentious, seemingly innocent and candid writing, Nowak is forthright in manner and downright refreshing to be around. In his last year at the College for Creative Studies, about two years ago, he beckoned four mentor-professors into a darkened room and turned on a black light. On the wall, gloriously luminescent portraits of each of them honored their dedication as teachers and their impact on his education. Painted in laundry soap (its phosphate content glows in black light), the homages were invisible in ordinary light and probably are still there. This inventiveness is typical of Nowak: "Painting is actually a bland process," he says. "I'm always looking for a way to change it up."

True to his energetic approach, 50 or so dripped self-portraits and other smart experiments fill the gallery. Reminiscent of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock (he actually looks a little like him), Nowak began with "drippings" of friends but became engaged with searching for who he was. While his approach is athletic, Nowak has uncanny control of his dripping. He's a good painter. His leaping self-portrait (entitled "I'm Going to France!") is extraordinary among his new work: Skillful, dappled scumbling emanates the spirit of the painting.

On one wall is an arrangement of 37 dripped self-portraits with the collective title "Blend in/Stand out." Each painting has a distinctive ground color — a la Warhol — and individualized palette of dripped colors, expressing a tremendous range of emotional states, from soft and gentle to confused, hurt, comic, amused, uncertain and dark. The permutations, Nowak says, represent the "nature of the hybrid conditions that make us who we are. While they are self-portraits of me they really are about how complex each of us are. They are portraits of everyone."

Nowak pushes the self-portrait genre by employing materials from popular culture and including autobiographical writing on canvas. His series "Prized Possessions" are a rare collection of comic books and NBA cards — with his head painted on the bodies of Spiderman and famed basketball players. In a small series called "Orientation Paintings," he handwrites confessions, meditating on his inner life and his relationship with the world. Writing by painters on canvas usually falls terribly flat; however, these journal-like entries are intuitively engaging and ferociously honest. They are also painfully altruistic, but if anyone can fulfill his promise to pay back the world for its gifts to him, as he wrote in a painting, it seems Nowak might. In a recent interview, he said when he was a kid he promised to become a "rich and famous painter so that he could buy his mom a Corvette."

What he's doing seems to be working. "I'm Going to France!" refers to his invitation to be in Docks Art Fair at the Lyon Biennial, where he was chosen as one of 40 up-and-coming artists. He's also in Art Santa Fe this month, Chicago's SOFA (Sculptural Objects and Functional Art) expo in November and another solo exhibition at Moka Gallery in Chicago in October. His Brighton high school teachers, whom he also honors in the "Orientation Paintings," should be proud of Nowak. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Gallery Artist: Craig Paul Nowak

Written by: Kim Laux
Published in: CCSCAD.edu

For centuries, artists have explored the expression of the self through their work. Often the representation is obvious, such as a reflection in the mirror. Other times, the image is so subtle that it could be easily overlooked by the casual observer. Regardless of how an artist chooses to portray the self, it is more important to examine the reasons why.

Through his portraits, artist Craig Paul Nowak is determined to help people understand the relationship between identity and inner consciousness as well as their own “self” and the selves of those around them.

“Although all of my work is self portraiture, it is not about myself,” said Nowak, who majored in fine arts at CCS. “It focuses on the relationship between physical identity and their inner consciousness. I express this connection through self portraits because I can only observe and/or understand my own inner consciousness.

“I'm actually interested in gaining a better understanding of human beings in general and passing that understanding on to my audience. I'm not bound to any particular media; the idea determines the materials best used to express it.” In September 2007, Nowak was invited to show work in the Dock’s Biennial show in Lyon, France. These works included paintings on books and video inlayed and/or projected onto paintings. Many of the pieces will be displayed in unorthodox ways, such as hung away from the wall using jewelry wire, hung on hinges with the painting on the front and back of the canvas, standing on pedestals atop of another painting, flat on the floor with the painting on the back of the canvas and traditional paintings with drawings or words scratched into the background.

Nowak’s inclusion in the contemporary art fair came as the result of an exclusive contract with Moka Gallery in Chicago earlier in the year. Since signing on with Moka, they have published advertisements for his portraits in multiple publications, featured his work at Art Santa Fe and Art Miami, helped him land the Mano y Mente residency in Tularosa, New Mexico, and arranged an artist residency for him in Beijing, China, as part of an exchange program involving NY Arts magazine. They have also sold his work to several important collectors.

Nowak attributes much of his professional success to the preparation he received as a student.

“I couldn’t have done any of this without CCS,” Nowak explained. “Before attending, I was oblivious to anything having to do with art and most things having to do with life. Now I feel confident in the knowledge that's been instilled in me. The experience was priceless.”

Your Life In Art

Written By: Fred Camper (Art Critic)
Published in: Arte Al Limite (6 and 7/2007)

Some are said to wear their hearts on their sleeves; in Craig Paul Nowak's diptych Divided (2007), his heart literally floats above his sleeves, in the form of two handwritten letters, one to his mother and the other to his father, that fill the black space on either side of his sad-looking face. The letters, full of conflicting emotions toward his parents, describe a troubled family history that includes inattention to him, a drug raid, his father's jail time, and finally divorce. His hand printed words surround his bald head as he stares, directly, at the viewer. While many artists incorporate their feelings about their families, Nowak does it with such engaging and bold directness that it's hard not to feel involved in his life story — and in the way this narrative inscribes itself on his soul.

Nowak was born on April 5, 1983, in Farmington Hills, Michigan; a few years later, his family moved to Brighton, roughly equidistant from Detroit, Lansing, and Flint. He grew up in a house on a dirt road, "on a lake with a beautiful backyard," in an area he likes to call "the 'hood of Brighton." He was the first in his family to attend college; his dad worked most of Craig's childhood in a tool and die company, and his mom's jobs included factory and retail work. His parents had met when his dad was 16 and his mom 13, and had his older sister (and only sibling) when his mom was about 18.

In childhood, Nowak was teased relentlessly on the school bus. "It was a daily event," he recalls. "I couldn't figure out why I was picked on." A nine-panel piece, Scream (2006), places an image of Nowak as an adult, screaming, in the center of images of his childhood tormentors. He became afraid to attend school, eventually was kicked out of eighth grade, and later dropped out of ninth, working for a few years. "I felt I was a bad kid," he says. "The teachers wouldn't make any effort toward me." At home, he played videogames and watched a lot of TV with his dad. But "the main memory throughout my childhood" is that after his dad came home from work, his parents had friends over, and they all smoked marijuana together. His dad also dealt, and some of these friends were his customers. "They'd play scrabble and card games," Nowak says. "I felt left out. I was introverted and isolated." Learning of the negative health effects of smoking, he asked his parents to stop, to no avail. He considered "divorcing" his parents. "I would scar up my arms," he recalls, using various methods. While talking to a school counselor, he pressed ridges into the tip of a plastic spoon with a fingernail and used it to scratch himself — "I was bleeding and we were talking about it while I was doing it." The way he surrounds his head with autobiographical texts that include his confusion and pain in Divided and some similar paintings can be taken as an aestheticized version of this act of early adolescence — symbolically instead of literally inscribing his feelings on his body.

By the time he left ninth grade for home schooling, Nowak had found some friends that he would skateboard and smoke cigarettes with, and with he made and recorded music with friends — "hip hop, talking about my problems and stuff." But also, "I wanted to have parents, wanted to be around them. I didn't feel neglected; I did feel like no one was listening to me. I figured, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." And so when Nowak was about 16, his parents, in response to his repeated requests, let him join their group and smoke with them. He worked as a stock clerk, and eventually went back to school, finally graduating from a community education high school in 2001.

The way Nowak's paintings use his face and text to address the viewer directly arguably reenact, on an aesthetic level, the communication problems he had in his youth. "I was against telephones. I wouldn't know how to go from one point in the conversation to another if I couldn't see the person's face. One time I was talking with a girlfriend and I went completely silent. She kept telling me, 'Say something,' and I didn't know what was wrong or what to say."

When Nowak was 18, and living in the family basement, he was awakened by knocking. Answering the front door, he was thrown against the wall by officers in a narcotics raid. His dad was eventually sentenced to a month in jail, his parents' marriage soon dissolved — and Nowak, who was already planning to quit smoking ("it wasn't fun anymore"), now did. After jail, his dad stopped dealing.

Nowak's parents sometimes put up friends in their basement. When Nowak was around ten, a Native American named Stonehorse stayed there. "He carved life-size portrait busts out of stone, so lifelike. He'd do them in such a short amount of time." Nowak, who had not yet been to a museum or gallery, was awed. He had been drawing from early childhood, but started to take it more seriously after he began smoking and hanging around with friends. His friends were impressed by his drawings, "and I started to understand that if you're good at something people would start to pay attention to you, so I got these sketchbooks and everyone would be looking over my shoulder. I was using my doodling to help me make friends, and wasn't intending to have an art career." His dad took him to the Detroit Institute of Arts for the first time, and "I was impressed by one of the large lifelike European painting." At the Cranbrook Art Museum, he was drawn to a hyper-realist Duane Hanson sculpture. In a community college painting class, he did still-life drawings and a copy of a painting by Van Gogh. A metal arts teacher in his last year of high school told him that he could "go to college for art," something he hadn't realized before, and he won an award for a necklace he made in her class. He began making drawings for his application portfolio — "one of a guy blowing his brains out" — and enrolled in Detroit's College for Creative Studies in the fall of 2002.

Nowak didn't much care for the foundation courses, but acquired an interest in Caravaggio and chiaroscuro, and in summer 2003, he painted portraits of others, and two self-portraits, "for fun." His second year he began a relationship with his partner, LaKela Brown, and they moved in together. But "we weren't exactly a perfect couple at first; there were communication issues that put the relationship in jeopardy." He was "mostly trying to figure out who I was, who was who, what was what." His art school work was "all over the place," he says; it included Influence (2005), a room-sized installation of wall portraits in laundry detergent of instructors who had affected him, visible only in black light. "There was a desk to symbolize me and a podium to symbolize the instructors; it was like exposing my internal self. Without them I wouldn't have grown as an artist and been able to do what I wanted to do."

LaKela broke up with him at the end of his third year, precipitating a crisis. "There was something wrong with me, and I had to figure it out. I started looking inward, trying to find out what the deal is with me, and looking at her and trying to find out what the deal is with her." That summer, 2005, while he was writing to her attempting to reconnect, he worked on his "Who Am I?" series, 10 30"x40" blue and white paintings. "That's where it all started," he says. Based on photos of his face from infancy to high school graduation, it portrays someone whose look changes so much that it's not always certain it's the same person. Seeking acceptance in school, Nowak had tried out different "looks" in school , and now he was reflecting on the consequent instability of his identity, and on who he really was. Having found so many judging him for superficial reasons, he had started "turning inward — because I didn't understand myself. Doing these paintings helped me understand more, about how I grew up, why it was a good thing for me to go through the mamma's boy phase, the drug phase, the jock phase, the goth phase, why they're a part of me." Now he began to find his true subject — "the relationship between inner and outer self," the outer self represented by his face and the inner, sometimes, by his writing. For “Who Am I?” II (2005), he wrote an autobiographical text over a painting of himself as a baby. "I was also doing urban graffiti" — he wrote the word "Lost," in large letters, in several places near Brighton and Detroit. Identity Crisis (2006) shows his face in abstracted drips — "because I couldn't recognize myself." By then, he and LaKela were together again.

For Things (2006), he installed prized possessions — comics, baseball cards, Edgar Allen Poe books, awards he had won — in glass cases along with silhouettes of himself, probing the nature of his identity in relationship to objects. "People can be defined by their things," Nowak says. A related series, "Prized Possessions," includes a nine-panel work in progress, juxtaposing Nowak's face with the covers of comic books from his childhood. For Alike and Part Of (2006), Nowak juxtaposes a painting of his adult face with scans of the faces of 35 childhood friends in a six-by-six panel grid. "It's about these poeple being a part of me," he says, and they seem to function similarly to the way his writing around his face does, surrounding and circumscribing him. For Piece of Me (2006), he took the art market into account, doing a self-portrait on 192 four-inch canvas squares. His idea was that if sold individually, they would represent "the way that when you meet people, they take away a piece of you, not physically but mentally" — but one collector bought the whole piece. Different (2006) arranges 36 drip paintings of his face in a grid, each with a different degree of abstraction. Each of the ten self-portraits in You, Me, Everybody II (2006) has a differently colored background, reflecting on how "we're all made up of the same stuff; different backgrounds is one of the main differences between people." For a current project, Envisioning My Self Within... (Art Forum) (2007), Nowak paints his face into art works by Lucien Freud, Andy Warhol, and others featured in Artforum ads. Imagining a more famous future, he once again depicts his own identity in terms of his visage, and implicitly asks how else he might be defined. "I always figured that the reason I started looking inward was that I didn't understand myself," but the terms of understanding that his search has yielded thus far, with the free-floating relationships he constructs between his face and its surroundings, might be described as more questions. But "it's never only about me," Nowak writes. "My self and my work are just catalysts for viewers to consider themselves as I do in my work."

Craig Paul Nowak

Friday, May 01, 2009

2005-08 Catalog

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

U245 Student Gallery Catalog 05-06

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Flickr Webpage

Thursday, December 06, 2007

2711

Divided

Library (Interest)

Tabula Rasa

One World / One Home

Piece of Me

Epiphany

History II & III (Personal)

History I (War and Culture)

Shuffle

Escape (Physical and Mental)

I Will: 99 Self Improvements

Individual

History IV (African American History)

Prized Possessions (Poe Books)

Eyes Open

Eyes Closed

About Me

Blog Archive

Artist Statement

Heady Art

Gallery Artist: Craig Paul Nowak

Your Life In Art

Links