Nick Lowe
Nick Lowe is a prolific Los Angeles-based painter and educator. His work dances with freeform connections, hints at concrete visual references, and beautifully presents an atmospheric river of energetic marks, compositions, and their eradication. He explores the news through the colorful, the personal, and the deceptively mundane.
“Scribble scrabble with the color until you get a satisfying blob. Watch it grow and crash into another blob; sometimes the blobs would have pockets of air and I would try to fill that in with color, like putting ketchup, blueberry jam, or peanut butter into the tiny hemispheres of the bubble wrap” – Nick Lowe
Nick Lowe (he/him) is an artist and educator living in Los Angeles. He makes drawings and paintings using color pencils, oil pastels, and oil stick, often making his own oil sticks by melting down wax and pigment on a hot plate. He builds up surfaces over time with avenues of lines, marks, and erasures, often starting intuitively, making a move then reacting to it. In both the drawings and paintings, mark-making a the main character while color plays a supporting role. While the work could be characterized as abstract, bits of architecture, human bodies, clouds, and fragments of the city occasionally surface within the primordial misasma. Early cubism, coffee shop expressionism, shapes and colors from an elementary school classroom, and failed grafitti attempts come to mind. Nick has been teaching drawing and painting at various colleges around Los Angeles since 2015, including UCLA and Pasadena City College, as well as working with neurodivergent adults at ASPIRE, a day program in Anaheim, CA. His work as an educator informs and defines his own practice. Nick has done shows at Harper’s, Grice Bench, Richard Telles, and Black Dragon Society in Los Angeles; as well as group shows at Gavin Brown Enterprise and Andrea Rosen in New York; Deste Foundation Athens; and the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Articles
Jan 20, 2023
Are Animal ‘Pests’ Really The Villains We Make Them Out To Be
Science Friday might be one of my favorite podcasts, and science news might be one of my favorite genres of news, next to arts and entertainment of course. It has the potential to be fun, fascinating, or really downright depressing and apocalyptic. On this week’s past episode of Science Friday, Bethany Brookshire was on who wrote a book called “Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains”. Pests are only pests because humans label them as such; you wouldn’t have house mice if you didn’t have a house, and if a pest thrives, it’s usually someone’s fault, like, they forgot to put the lid on the trashcan. Also, humans have what researchers call a “dominion-associated mindset”, meaning people always think they are in charge, and when you are in charge, of course, the thing that is eating your grain will be labeled a “pest”. This is mostly in Western societies though. I learned a lot of interesting things from this interview. In some places, Elephants are pests and they will bulldoze your house to get at food. Pigeons, who are now considered pests, used to be valued members of society. They could carry messages, feed themselves, their poo made wonderful fertilizer, and you could eat them, and supposedly they were delicious. After people started eating chicken though no one ate pigeons anymore. This just made me think about living in harmony with our animal neighbors. This book is out now and I can’t wait to read it. I mean, all these so-called “pests” are just trying to live, just like us, and I bet to some animals, we’re the pests.
Published by Science Friday Prodcast
Jan 13, 2023
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Jan 20, 2023
Australia’s ‘Toadzilla’: Record-breaking cane toad found in Queensland
Frogs seem to be the zeitgeist animal for young artists these days and I see them appearing in a lot of paintings and drawings. I see fewer toads though, which is weird because to me the difference between a frog and a toad is like the difference between a crocodile and an alligator; I could get easily confused. This was a giant toad that was found in Australia. Park Ranger Kylee Gray, who found the toad, said it looked like a “football with legs”.
I’m not sure if she’s talking about American Football or Australian rules football, but this big toad has football-like skin. It weighs 2.7 kg and it ate a bunch of insects, reptiles, and small mammals, basically, if it can fit something in its mouth it will eat it. Toads are non-native species to Australia- they were brought to the country in 1930 and they have no natural predators; there are now more than 2 billion of these creatures. In my science class freshman year of high school, we watched this documentary that I would recommend to everyone called “Cane Toads” about this very problem, and it was hands down the best movie I watched while in a high school classroom. It was very funny, and hippies in Australia would keep these toads as pets and they would yell at their pet toads. The toads would get scared and secrete venom on their skin. Hippies would lick the toad venom and hallucinate. Anyways, they killed the toad because it’s the official policy and they are going to donate its body to a museum.
Published by BBC
Jan 20, 2023
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Jan 20, 2023
Recent coyote attacks in Southern California the fault of people, expert says
There are three coyotes in our neighborhood and they are so bold, so I’ve been trying to figure out what their story is and reading a lot of coyote news. This is from a month ago, but it had a lot of good information about coyotes. Apparently, you are supposed to scare them off. I walk my dog at night, so I’m always a little worried about coyotes. I’ve been seeing them every night, but I never fear they are going to do anything. The other night I saw one run and they go fast, he was jetting, and it had some serious turbo. They are so quiet when they run. There is a website called Coyote Catcher where you can report coyote sightings, and all coyote sightings along with reports of the incident are labeled on a map. They also have a healthy FAQ just about coyote encounters in general. You can buy coyote-proof vests for dogs, which are basically just vests that have sharp spikes on the vest and collar. They aren’t cheap though- $109 dollars, but that’s definitely less than a vet bill. In 2020, a coyote attacked a toddler in Woodland Hills and tried to drag it away, which was probably the most terrifying piece of coyote news that I came across.
Published by KTLA
Dec 13, 2022
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Jan 19, 2023
Microsoft is working on an AI called VALL-E that can clone your voice from a 3-second audio clip
I first heard about this on a recent episode of Science Friday. Microsoft is working on an AI that can clone your voice from a 3-second audio clip. I kind of wonder what would happen if you got ChatGPT to write a fake Nick Cave song and then cloned his voice. How Nick Cave would react to that? Or if you got Chat GPT to write a fake Slavoj Žižek lecture and then cloned Žižek’s voice… I’m sure something like that has already been done, maybe in the deep fake realm, but I think computers are just going to get better and better and making art. Microsoft is investing $10 Billion in ChatGPT. I think people are going to create some far out things with all the accessible Generative AI that is on the horizon. It’s going to complicate the world and we are going to have to get smarter and actually communicate with one another or become extinct, I guess. Science Friday is another great podcast that I listen to, I usually hear snippets of news items that I can then research further, and you get a lot of great commentary on recent news items from the listeners. Computers can recreate voices (maybe it was done with Orson Welles recently?), but usually, they need hundreds of hours of audio; with Vall-e it just needs a three-second clip. Perhaps the Dodgers can get the golden voice of sports commentator Vin Scully back with this new technology.
Published by Business Insider
Jan 19, 2023
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Jan 19, 2023
How ‘everywhere chemicals’ help uterine fibroids grow
They are figuring out that there are these common tumors in women that are somehow caused by phthalates, and they’ve been linked to cancerous tumors that range from the size of a pomegranate seed to a bucket of KFC that can grow in or around the uterus. Phthalates- that’s a funny word. I feel like there are not a lot of words that contain the letter “h” twice, and so close together too! Phthalates increase the flexibility, transparency, durability, and longevity of plastics, and they are found in a lot of common household items and cosmetics. There’s a lot of plastic in the world- it boggles the mind. Going to do what I can to reduce my interaction with plastic in 2023… although I also planned to stop oil painting and go back to acrylic, and it doesn’t get more plastic than acrylic paint. With painting you can’t win; it’s not good for you to spend a lot of time around paint. The painter Rebecca Morris told this funny story during the walkthrough of her fantastic show at ICA LA- she said that when she was young, Arthur Danto’s wife came up to her and told her that she must wear a respirator and gloves when she painted, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to paint by the time she was 40, that most painters that Danto’s Wife knew were having serious health problems.
Published by National Geographic
Jan 13, 2023
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Jan 19, 2023
Study: Exxon Mobil accurately predicted warming since 1970s
This is kind of shocking, but not really. I would love to not have to rely on big oil at all, to get by completely on solar power, ride my bike, and not own a car. I’ve never bought gas from Exxon because there was a big Exxon oil spill when I was a kid and I saw a picture of a pelican covered in oil, but I think most energy companies that do fossil fuels are equally bad. I first heard of this story on Democracy Now! and followed a couple of different links for this.
Published by Associated Press
Jan 12, 2023
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Jan 18, 2023
School Is in Session, Power or Not
As heartbreaking and devastating as the situation in Ukraine is, it’s a beautiful thing to see teachers and students persevering in order to learn and engage the human mind. I know this is a fantasy, but there should be some agreed-upon war etiquette that states that war that schools will remain safe havens and will have resources and power, I don’t know how that would work, but it seems so fucked up that kids have to suffer during wartime. Recently I’ve been continually reminded that I’m incredibly lucky that my entire education, from pre-school to grad school, has been uninterrupted by external conflict. Since I started teaching, I’ve had significant interruptions in my semesters (and quarters) due to school shooters, COVID, civil unrest, uprisings, and labor strikes. I think the future of education in this country (US) will be dealing with these types of interruptions, but I think education in other places maybe always has had to exist amongst pretty ghastly interruptions. From what I’ve read, a big concern for education in Ukraine is the power outages. The images in the article show a lot of students doing their homework with flashlights of their cell phones.
Published by New York Times
Jan 17, 2023
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Jan 18, 2023
Do Not Pass Go (2022)
A lot of days I don’t have time to go deep with the news, so I’ll download a podcast that’s kind of news-ish to listen to while I drive. I really love Throughline; they always tackle interesting topics, you get to hear from multiple voices, and the production is excellent. It might currently be my favorite podcasts.
The story of the board game Monopoly is a crazy one. I watched a show about it on the History Channel while I was flying in an airplane, but this podcast goes deeper. The long story short of it is that there is this guy Charles Darrow who supposedly invented the game, using his hard work and good old American ingenuity, and it’s all about getting that money and getting property and pursuing the American dream but the game was actually invented by Lizie J. Magie, who was a follower of the economist Henry George, who believed that people should own the value that they produce themselves, but the economic value of land (including all natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. The original version of the game was called Landlord and it was designed to teach children about the problems of capitalism. The game then went through a lot of different iterations and was passed on from person to person, with people making their own game boards that were customized, and all types of different people added something new to the game which has now become the Monopoly that we know today. The true history of Monopoly was uncovered by Ralph Anspach, an Economic professor who developed a game called Anti-Monopoly and was sued by Parker Brothers. It was during his case that he discovered the true history of the game. Every game of Monopoly I’ve played has gone on forever and always got pretty dark toward the end. I think this is all pretty relevant now with these goddamn sky-high rents in Los Angeles.
Published by NPR
Jan 12, 2023
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Jan 18, 2023
Nick Cave says ChatGPT’s AI attempt to write Nick Cave lyrics “sucks”
Another ChatGPT story. This time from an artist’s perspective. I like Nick Cave, but I also feel he’s someone who takes himself so seriously, so his getting annoyed by Chat GPT songs in his style is funny to me. I don’t care what level you are at as an artist, making things is hard, and for some reason songwriting seems especially difficult. He makes the point that “Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.
“ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”
I have no doubt in my mind that the AI-generated Nick Cave lyrics probably do suck, what separates the great from the lousy in art is always just a few millimeters, and Cave kind of sums it up beautifully, but maybe data does suffer. How do we know that the collective algorithm of ChatGPT isn’t developing a consciousness? Do androids dream of electric sheep?
I guess I wonder if AI is able to exist without human beings, what kind of data will be exchanged? AI probably won’t care about song lyrics.
Published by BBC News
Jan 17, 2023
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Jan 17, 2023
Trying to Live a Day Without Plastic
I remember reading AJ Jacobs’ ‘The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible,’ about ten years ago. I felt it was the journalistic equivalent of some of the art that I loved as an undergrad, something absurd or immersive, like a Chris Burden, Sophie Calle, or Vito Acconci piece, where you restructure your life for some creative project. In this piece ‘Trying to Live a Day Without Plastic’ I became aware of just how prevalent plastic is and how much it would cost to actually avoid it. There’s a grocery store I go to sometimes called _re (it used to be called Tare but they shortened the name) in Highland Park. You can bring your old glass jars and fill them up with rice, lentils, oats, and other dry goods from bins. They also have shampoo, conditioner, and laundry soap. The point is to reduce plastic waste, and you do, but it’s also the most expensive grocery store; the few times I’ve been, I end up spending about what it would cost to buy a Nintendo (also made out of plastic, also, for the record, I don’t own a Nintendo). I realized reading this piece how plastic is everywhere. Jacobs is truly, genuinely funny, but I think he’s just a normal guy who puts himself in nearly impossible situations that highlight just how absurd something is, and he is able to write about it in a clear and straightforward manner. He goes to the store and only uses coins because there is plastic in paper money, credit cards, and smart phones. He carries his coins in a cloth sack. He counts out about twenty dollars in change and apologizes to the cashier, who tells him that he meditates every morning so he “can deal with turmoil like this.” Plastic is everywhere, avoiding it is expensive, and reading this heightened my awareness of that fact. Aside from that, this piece, like every AJ Jacobs piece of writing I’ve encountered, is a super fun read.
Published by New York Times
Jun 20, 2023
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Jan 17, 2023
Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach
This Chat GPT phenomenon is fascinating, how students can generate papers using AI. I haven’t fully wrapped my head around it yet, and I don’t totally understand the implications, but I guess you can write an entire 5-page essay using Chat GPT and it’s not terrible. I tried using Chat GPT recently but the server was flooded and it told me to come back another time. I teach, so I’m wondering how this is going to effect anything I do in the classroom. I’ve made moves to exit classroom technology post-COVID and I won’t post anything on Canvas (which is the program/website that is mostly used for any kind of online class interaction), and I tell students that if you miss an assignment you need to ask someone else in the class. I always want to privilege the in-person classroom environment and make it so you have to come to class, although some might argue that is an able-ist position. It’s the easiest way to teach painting though. Anyways, I’ve heard that professors are using AI to generate comments on students’ papers as well. Perhaps there will just be computer teachers and computer students in classes all throughout the future, and there will be millions of papers generated and graded and this cycle will go on and on for infinity. Fortunately for me, I don’t deal with the side of academia that has to assign and grade papers, but I think this will affect education across the board. I know there’s Dall-E 2 that can be used as an image generator, but of course, if you are in a painting class, there is no way to simulate the materiality and the tactility of the paint… yet.
Published by New York Times
Jan 16, 2023
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Jan 17, 2023
MLK Day Special: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in His Own Words
I only have a few go-to news sources, and those are The NY Times, The LA Times, and a podcast, Democracy Now! (I’m not saying this with an exclamation point, it’s just there’s an exclamation point in the title of the podcast.) As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found Martin Luther King day to be a good time to reflect on his life and work and so much of his vision for a more just and equitable future has not been realized. Democracy Now! played two of his speeches. He had such a great way of putting words together, and such an amazing way of speaking them. I’m usually listening to Democracy Now! as I do other tasks, but during these speeches, I had to just sit down and listen. I had never heard the speech “Beyond Vietnam” before, which was one of the speeches that they played. I know it’s not technically breaking news because it happened on April 4th, 1967, a year before he was assassinated, but I had never heard this speech before so it was news to me. This one thing he said really floored me:
“We must rapidly begin — we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
We are still a thing-oriented society, and the device that I listened to this speech on (my smartphone) is a product of a thing-oriented society, so I recognize the hypocrisy. He had a lot to say about economic change, but I believe he mentioned how everyone should be guaranteed a job, and if you can’t work, you should be guaranteed an income. The way his words are able to illuminate the clarity of his thoughts always brings me to tears. There’s one more that seems obvious but I found really powerful:
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
Published by Democracy Now!
Jan 16, 2023
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Jan 16, 2023
Alta Mesa Cemetery furnishes final resting place for many, touches neighbors’ lives
I always check in with my old high school’s newspaper. I went to Henry M. Gunn, which is a public high school in Palo Alto, CA. Unlike most people in the arts, I had a positive experience in high school. At the time, it seemed pretty dreadful, but I always look back on it fondly. I really loved when the school paper would come out every month and I would read it cover to cover. Anyways, when I was in school there was this cemetery across the street and we used to go there at lunch to smoke (cigarettes) and hang out. It was quiet, peaceful, and private; I wasn’t goth or anything I just needed someplace with nature without institutional architecture to recharge my batteries, but I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that as a teenager. Pigpen, the keyboard player from the Grateful Dead was buried there and we visited his grave a few times. Shirley Temple was buried there, I learned that from this article, also Steve Jobs is buried there as well, but he was alive when I was in high school; the iPod hadn’t been invented yet, and you only knew who Steve Jobs was if you subscribed to computer magazines. Fun fact: my mom bought tickets to the Pickle Family Circus from Steve Jobs in the early 90’s. Anyways, I kind of love that my high school has a newspaper that I have access to, and I love local news that isn’t the big show (NYT, Washington Post, LA Times, etc.) and I always try to seek out the local news source, or amateur news, and local news that is covering things that are happening very locally, that might not resonate with anyone outside of a ten-mile radius. Anyways, this was a cool piece that talked about the cemetery, its history, what it’s trying to do now, and just the idea of having a cemetery across from a high school. Also, our mascot was the Titan and so I think that’s kind of cool that the paper is called the Oracle, and I only get that Greek Myth reference now as an adult.
Published by The Oracle
Oct 28, 2022
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Jan 16, 2023
Sheriff’s calls: Sunday, January 1
This is from the Point Reyes Light Newspaper. They just report the calls to the Sherrif (sic). I know these are probably pretty important if you live in the area, but I almost see them as American Poetry at its finest. At 2:33 AM a neighbor heard yelling and banging while at 4:46 PM a cow was loose. Everything is always happening somewhere.
Published by Point Reyes Light
Jan 1, 2023
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Jan 16, 2023
Here’s Why the 7-Eleven Logo Looks Like That
I’ve always been fascinated by 7-Eleven. Why does Starbucks and McDonalds always seem to get vilified while 7-Eleven goes more or less unscathed? Is it because it serves the community pretty directly? You could get a decent meal there for a low pricepoint if you were in a pinch. I wish they had more healthy options though. They are everywhere and hide in plain sight. When I teach beginning drawing, one of the assignments I give out on the first day is to draw the 7-Eleven logo from memory. It’s an assignment I stole from Jon Pestoni, who might have gotten it from Meg Cranston. For the seven years I’ve been teaching drawing, only one person has gotten the detail of the lowercase n on the sign; I flipped out when it happened. The seven eleven sign is definitely part of our contemporary landscape.
Published by Reader's Digest
Sep 20, 2021
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