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 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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