Ron Veasey and Nicole Storm in the Creative Growth Studio.
Creative Growth Gallery Director Sarah Galender Meyer sits down (virtually!) with SFMoMA Curator Nancy Lim and Studio Special Projects Coordinator Kathleen Henderson to gain insight into artists Nicole Storm and Ron Veasey, who are featured in The Rainbow Two.
Sarah Galender Meyer: Thank you both for taking the time to talk today—I'm so glad that it worked out. I asked you both to have this conversation because I think each of your perspectives will bring some interesting insight to this show, as well as some rigor to thinking about Ron and Nicole’s work. Nancy, as a curator at a major institution with a broad knowledge of contemporary art, and Kathleen, as an artist yourself and someone who’s been watching Ron and Nicole work for many years, I think you both have unique and valuable frames of reference. No pressure!
Kathleen Henderson: I'm so glad to be doing this because it forces me to think about their work in other contexts, which I don't always do, because I'm so close to these artists and their work. I was thinking about how to place Ron Veasey’s work among other contemporary painters like Amy Sherald, Barkley L. Hendricks, or Henry Taylor. But I woke up thinking of this painting that's in the Met by Velasquez. It’s a portrait of Juan de Pareja. I remember when I first saw it. I walked into the room and I felt like this painting was looking at me. I almost felt like it was following me around the room. When you stand in front of a painting of Ron’s, it's looking at you and it's demanding. The similarity in experience is remarkable because stylistically they have nothing in common, but there's some kind of energy, some kind of psychic space that opens up which is undeniable.
Nancy Lim: That’s very true, and the comparison strikes me as apt and beautiful. In both of their paintings, the interiority of the depicted subjects is intense, even when the subjects’ faces aren’t expressive in a flashy way. Ron doesn’t often paint people grinning or yelling, for example. His facial expressions are so much more subtle than that, and that’s what makes his subjects complex and powerful. There’s an intense transmission of their interiority that we experience, and we’re also gifted a rich emotional dynamic between us and them.
KH: Yeah, there really is a distillation. His tightly found composition takes you to the space where you can absorb this emotion that you're talking about. Often it's the eyes. For somebody who’s mostly non-verbal these paintings speak really loudly. They’re commanding and demanding.
Ron Veasey’s installation in The Rainbow Two.
NL: So how does he do it? There are a few details we could easily pinpoint: the yellows of the eyes, the straightforward gaze, the juxtapositions of colors. Somehow all these little things accumulate to a mysterious, incredible sum.
KH: Ultimately what makes a great work of art is an element of mystery that you can never quite figure out. When he chooses resource material or a photograph to work from, he'll spend half a day going through images. He's been working from the same book of contemporary South African photography [Figures & Fictions, ed. Tamar Garb] for over three years, he knows the book inside and out. He knows what's on those pages, but maybe the flipping through the images is a kind of incubation. And that process of looking is a kind of energy that then comes forward when he starts the painting. He starts with a big piece of paper and a pencil. Every time he lays it out, it reminds me of one of those Ellsworth Kelly botanical drawings, where you just really get the sense of the whole form from that simple pencil line. In that process, which maybe takes him a half an hour, he delineates the figure and works out the composition. All those decisions on how to lay it out are made really quickly. And I think maybe it's that incubation period of consideration that gives it strength.
NL: This incubation period is so interesting. Well, all the temporalities that are part of his process are—from the slow, deliberate period of absorbing and thinking to his speedy, decisive executions. What is it that you think he’s looking for and thinking through, formally or psychically, when selecting his source imagery?
KH: I sometimes think it's a moment of rebuke. There is an element of wanting to be seen and just a bit of accusation to them, I think.
NL: An assertiveness, maybe.
SGM: I would say this is definitely true in his earlier fashion portraits. There’s a lot of attitude, which he seemed to gravitate towards. You can see it in a few of his current paintings as well, but because the photographs themselves are a little more self-effacing, there’s more subtlety in their expression. He still adds the side-eye gaze and in some of these portraits, and they don’t exactly exude a welcoming or warm presence. Ron seemed to really tap into the more complex range of emotions in the photographs he used in this series, which makes sense given the book’s context. Even in Ron’s portraits where you don't see much attitude, you can tell there’s a lot brewing under the surface.
NL: Somehow the fact that he tends to be quiet and self-effacing makes it less surprising that his works are the opposite. They’re very assertive optically. It seems like he really suffuses his internal life into these portraits of other people—or rather, his paintings of photographs. The black-and-white photos especially interest me because that’s where you see his decisions around color most dramatically. Can you talk more about this vibrant, saturated palette of his? Do you see any visual logic or pattern to his color selections?
KH: His palette is flashy. He loves iridescent colors and really bright greens and bright pinks. It is wonderful to see them in juxtaposition with Nicole Storm’s work. There really is that connection of radiant color.
Left: Untitled (RVe 202), Ron Veasey, 2019
Right: Lerato Marumola, Embekweni, Paarl, Zanele Muholi, 2009
NL: There is. Nicole creates a “storm” of radiant colors, and Ron’s are equally vibrant but his compositions are orderly and each color has its place, its home. He applies his colors so carefully and devotedly that it becomes clear, when looking at his works, that a random spot in the background is just as important and attended to as his subject’s face. Those beautiful planes of color forming the ground seem to be a way for him to draw our eyes over every last inch of his surfaces. And he ends up creating a delicate balance between a background that’s in service to the figure and a background that is its own raison d’etre. This dynamic between figure and ground reminds me of Barkley Hendricks’s paintings and how that dynamic shapes our relationship with the person pictured.
KH: It's almost like a magic act bringing those two elements together, portraiture and abstract configuration. It's a great place to be as a painter. It's a really interesting balance.
NL: Yeah, it is. And that distillation we were talking about—I’m fascinated by what he decides to depict or exclude from the source image. Do you know how he comes to those decisions?
KH: There is this kind of incubation period where he's looking and looking. And then he makes all those abstract decisions right away. It all happens in a quick moment, it is locked into place and then the rest of the painting is lovingly put together.
NL: I like that phrase “locked into place” because his compositions can be very puzzle-like, with these shapes of color he fits together to form the overall rectangle of the work.
I'm wondering if we can go back in time a little bit and lay out a foundation. How was Ron introduced to Creative Growth and when was that? I’m curious, too, about some of the key changes you’ve seen in his practice over the years.
SGM: Ron came to Creative Growth in 1981, just 7 years after it had opened in 1974. So he’s been coming to Creative Growth for a very long time. I haven’t seen a lot of his early work, but from what I’ve seen, I don’t think it changed monumentally in the four decades he’s been here. He seemed to always be very interested in pure, solid shapes and forms, and always liked drawing people and animals. There is something about his recent portraits that have more weight and presence than they used to. I think over time, a depth of expression started showing up, and a more sophisticated way of portraying bodies. Even in just the last ten years, which could have been a result of his increased interest in fashion portraits. Ron really started gaining more recognition around his fashion work, so he stuck with it for a long time. I think that’s why we were so excited about Ron’s attachment to this photography book—it really signaled a shift in his work.
KH: In the last five or six years, we've had more interesting resource material for the artists. We've made a greater effort to have books and images and magazines that reflect the diversity of our community and many of the artists have responded to that. And specifically, that's why we got this book for Ron. This book has been a real turning point for him. Ron has been coming to Creative Growth for almost 40 years. He is a mature artist who's really coming into his own. The decision making and the level of work he is producing reflects just how hard and how long he has been at it.
NL: His commitment to this book as a resource is a really interesting mystery. What do you think has been driving this? And do you often share other museum catalogs with him, or images of works by other painters of portraits, such as Barkley Hendricks, Beauford Delaney, or Alice Neel?
KH: We regularly go to museums. We recently saw the Kwame Brathwaite show at the Museum of the African Diaspora, which he seemed to really like. Whenever there's an interesting show in town we go see it. But I haven't specifically shown him books of portraiture. There is a specific kind of balance as a Studio Instructor at Creative Growth, where you want to give people all the materials that they need, but you also don't want to unduly influence people's work. I try to stay out of the way as much as I can.
NL: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Providing support that’s reliable but not intrusive.
Ron Veasey in the Studio.
KH: As for this book, I do think it's maybe his first reference that is mostly images of Black people, and Ron is Black. But I think there's something about this certain compilation of South African photography that has been photographed since the end of apartheid. They seem to be about a reclamation of identity. They're all really powerful, and perhaps that is what he is responding to.
NL: Sarah wrote in a text for Creative Growth’s website that she imagines Ron as having conversations with these photographs and that these conversations resulted in the paintings we see here. What kind of conversation do you imagine is happening?
SGM: I think one of the things about this book that is so fascinating, is that the majority of photographers are intentionally creating photographs that go beyond ‘true’ and singular representation. They are intentionally infusing the issues of race, class, and gender in post-Apartheid South African identity into their photographs, and some of them layering commentary about a very disparaging history of portraiture in Africa on top of that. That’s what I meant about the photographs themselves being edits or filters of reality. Then when I was thinking about the choices that Ron makes when he’s painting, it felt like the final piece was yet another edit of these very loaded images.
NL: My understanding is that this book also precipitated—or coincided with?—a shift in scale. He started working with larger paper in 2017, is that right?
KH: Around that time we opened a new studio space at Creative Growth. It's called the ‘quiet room’ and it's for folks who want to work on something larger or are having a bad day, or need more one on one support. It's a smaller room and there's usually only between two and five people there, as opposed to the much more action packed environment of the downstairs studio. I had been working with Ron downstairs and I could see that he had this incredible authority in his work that could really benefit from scaling up. He began working on an easel as opposed to working flat on a table, which changes things. He took instantly to the new set-up. Perhaps this shift in scale was a long time coming.
NL: When he shifted to a larger scale, and from working flat on a table to upright on an easel, were there other changes you saw—changes in his palette, materials, form, the psychologies he was exploring?
KH: He started to work more with paint, rather than Prisma sticks that we often use. It's a different stroke and it's different handling. There were some shifts. Although, surprisingly, there's a lot of similarity to his earlier work.
NL: He’s continued those primal yellow eyes. Sometimes they’re unnerving; they really intensify our encounter with the people he’s depicted.
KH: Often he paints the eyes first.
NL: I was wondering about that and whether there’s a consistent sequence to his process. Also, more background environments seem to be creeping in.
KH: This series is heading in that direction. It seems like he's heading towards that place of incorporating more of the environment.
NL: That brings Barkley Hendricks back to mind. Usually, Ron seems to remove his figures from their original environments and insert them into a decontextualized field of color so that they’re no longer inhabiting, say, a street but instead a shimmering plane of gold. What results is something less pictorial and more optical.
I also noticed how he positions the figures relative to the frame. He often cuts them off somewhere along the leg so that they’re anchored to (or by) the bottom frames. I can't imagine that all the source imagery he's looking at shares that same crop.
KH: Right. He does make decisions around that. If you cut off the figure around the knee, that means that the viewer is in the same space as the figure. You're actually in the same room. If you see the feet of a figure, they're over there and you're over here. It creates physical and psychological distance. That’s a decision that he makes to put the viewer in concert with the figure in a different way. He opens up a psychic dialogue that seems to say “Look at me.”
NL: Their life-size scale really shapes your relationship to them.
KH: Yeah, at that scale they're seen more as individuals with a personality and a history. A smaller image becomes more like a painting of a person and seems to place it in the past as opposed to the present. You have to face it in a different way. And that's what's so amazing about the Barkley Hendricks images. They're so huge.
NL: Yeah, and that not only invites conversation, it declares that a conversation will happen. As you say, if the works were smaller scale, we’d probably encounter them more as objects—as small, discrete things hanging from the wall—and less as portals to dialogue. Whereas here, we’re engaging in a sensuous optical experience at the same time that we’re contending and conversing with the figures before us.
SGM: On that note, shall we switch gears to Nicole ‘Sunshine’ Storm?
Left: Nicole Storm in the Studio.
Right: Untitled (NS 82), Nicole Storm, 2020
NL: Is “Sunshine” her nickname or middle name?
KH: Her nickname.
NL: I love that. By the way, how did this show come about—why Nicole and Ron together? One of the reasons I ask is that it’s fascinating to pair two artists whose practices and energies are different, if not opposite. Ron does beautiful distillations, while Nicole’s practice is entropic and explosive.
SGM: I definitely get a lot of inquisitive looks about that. And it’s true—everything about their work and process is so different. For me, it was really about them both already having established pretty strong artistic voices, and both shifting their practice around the same time. For Ron, he became engrossed with this book and started working larger and more consistently with paint to create this powerful series. And Nicole started working on materials that she couldn’t fold and stash away, and began integrating these beautiful washes of paint with her ‘notes’ and making choices with composition that also felt more sophisticated.
KH: When you decided, Sarah, to put Nicole and Ron in a show together, we asked Nicole for a title idea, and without missing a beat she said “The Rainbow Two.” It is such a good title. They are both so luminous.
NL: What a poetic title. Luminous, and they also share an expansive rainbow chromatic range, as well as a love for every inch of their surfaces.
KH: The challenge of working with Nicole is to honor her process. She moves around a lot and also moves her work around the studio, more often than not tucking her pieces away. She does like to encompass the whole space, the entire studio becomes her work. And so how do you honor that process and still gather the work in a way to share it with the world?
NL: Does she keep an archive? For example, when she finds materials that she’s interested in but doesn't necessarily want to use right away, does she store them in one place?
Nicole Storm at work on her installation for The Rainbow Two.
KH: She has a bag that she carries with her that has a big stack of papers that she's always working on. And those are what she calls her ‘notes’ and those are things she's thinking about, people that she loves, dates that interest her, and things that happened in the past. She's always writing and making notes around that. Then those same ideas get written large on the wall or on these larger pieces. Hers is a process that never seems to end. It is very different for an artist like Ron, who comes every morning to make work and then at three o'clock he gets on the bus to go home. He’s been repeating that for decades. Nicole never seems to stop. She's making work all the time. She's making work on her way out the door. She's in the elevator. I can't tell you how many times the elevator door opens up and there's Nicole inside working away. She never stops, which is an amazing, beautiful thing.
NL: I love this image of her carrying a bag of memories. When I came to visit, I think I heard her say that her marks and loops and scrawls are how she records her memories.
KH: I think they are memories of things and people that she knows. She often takes some of her smaller works, places them on her larger pieces and does a tracing of them. So they're both tracings of memories, but also tracings of actual things. She's deriving inspiration from many things all at once. She's thinking of her brother and she's also thinking of the clipboard that's hanging on the wall and the lunch that she's having.
SGM: I think what's so brilliant about her process is that it’s so organic and it’s so heavily influenced by what's happening around her at that moment. For instance, if she's having a conversation, that usually makes its way into her work. And what’s great about this installation is that it’s a sort of map of who was around that day while she was working, and what she was thinking about in any given moment. A lot of the marks on the wall are her notations of a conversation she had with one of us, or she had a memory, or she wants to go to Hawaii or Paris or something like that. Her artwork is really a response to her environment, and her internal and external dialogues. She doesn’t filter, or have the same kind of consternation that some artists have around their artwork. It all just flows from her very naturally and easily.
Nicole Storm’s installation in The Rainbow Two.
NL: She comes to Creative Growth once a week. Is that right?
KH: She came just for the installation of the show. She came two days a week for about three or four weeks. As an artist for which movement is so critical to the process, I think it has been particularly difficult to be sheltering in place.
NL: It sounds painful. There’s such a freedom to the way she works and to the immediacy of these transmissions of her environment, her conversations, her thoughts, her interactions. All of that pouring into her drawings, like an archive being made in real time.
The other thing I'm curious to get your thoughts on is the presence of a grid. Sometimes it’s hidden by more dominant forms, and other times it’s scrubbed out by washes. Her works are so layered and full, even chaotic. But when I look carefully, I often see a grid undergirding the compositions.
KH: I do think a lot of her visual inspiration comes from pieces of paper like this that we have around the studio that have various texts on it. She very often carries around a clipboard that has all the names of the artists on it. And there's the grid element in all of those. They are a very common reference point for her, she often starts with that. And then the entropy that you speak of comes as the process continues and she brings in color and washes and other collage elements.
NL: This entropy also expresses itself through her enthusiasm for using all available surfaces and orientations. The front, sides, backs of her paper or cardboard, or the ceilings of the spaces she’s installing in. Has she done that for most of her practice?
KH: Everything is available to her to make a mark on. She doesn't really see things as front and back. It's all there. She folds and rips her paper and leaves her marks in unexpected places.
Nicole Storm at work on her installation for The Rainbow Two.
NL: I was going to ask about exactly that—if she rips her paper. When I was in the gallery and saw the uneven edges, I instantly imagined her arms ripping the paper and thought about the physical dynamism that infuses all her work. Of course, that dynamism is in her last name, too—Storm!
KH: The folding and ripping does seem to be part of her sense of movement and incorporating all sides and everything in her world all at once. She's in it all the time.
NL: Right. And I love that she isn’t the only one who’s moving; she’s making everything else move, too: making the paper move as it folds and rips, making the pens and the brushes move. She animates them all.
KH: She also moves her large pieces around the studio. Sometimes it can get a little dangerous because she can't always see what’s on the other side.
NL: When did she start creating installations?
SGM: In January 2018, for a show called An Other Life. I think when I started working here, there was some tension with Nicole because I couldn’t find her portfolio when I wanted to see her work, and if I found a piece of hers and moved it she’d get upset with me because she likes to move her with her work and intentionally stashes it around the building. So it just seemed like it was time to see if she’d respond to a more formal opportunity to create this world that she was quietly and subversively constructing. We had no idea how she would respond, and honestly, I think we all had some preconceived ideas about what it would be. She really blew our minds with that installation. Her choices seemed to come so easily to her: she hung work from the lighting grid, wrapped artwork up and over the dividing wall, and spread out on the floor. It was really interesting to watch how she related to her finished work in this way. And then she started using it as a workspace during the show, which was so great. There’s a photo of her in one of our magazines of her sitting in one of the big boxes while she’s working.
KH: She jumped right in and it was so much like what she's doing in the studio all the time. The entire studio was like an installation to her and she has places where she puts her work, even when she was putting this installation together last month. I would go to get some clean water for her, and I'd see that there was a new piece stuck somewhere in the studio. Her entire world is like an installation. So letting her have the gallery to install was a no brainer for her, like, finally. Yeah, I can do this. She could easily take over the whole gallery with a project. And hopefully, she'll get that opportunity at White Columns. I can't wait for her to take New York.
NL: Is that happening soon?
SGM: It was supposed to happen this past summer, but moved to 2021.
NL: That’s so great. I love how embracing she is—of space, and especially of her materials and all the physical phases they undergo throughout their lives, from being crisp and fresh, to weathered and torn up. The fact that she stuffs them in her bag and carries them around with her, it doesn’t seem like she treats them as precious objects that have to stay pristine.
KH: I think there's some things that she holds a little closer. The papers In her bag really seem about her interior life that she likes she likes to hold on to. I know they're going to be beautiful and those are the things that Nicole wants to hold on to for a while before letting them go. But I think they are dear to her. And I think also, they're not finished. She wants to keep them until they're really done. There seems to be a kind of bifurcation with the smaller works and the other larger works that she can't fold and take with her and that she embraces in a different kind of way.
NL: The other thing I noticed is how her works fly into each other and overlap. Both within each work and in the overall installation, it feels like a party. There's a joy and sociability, which seems perfectly in line with her personality.
KH: You put it really well. It does seem like a party. The visual art party. And she's so beloved by everybody in the studio. It really is a reflection of her personality and her dramatic way of going about things. You know, she's always singing and dancing as much as she is painting and drawing. It's really wonderful. I miss working with her.
SGM: Well, thank you both for taking the time to talk about Ron and Nicole’s show – it’s nice to have the space to think a little deeper and make some new connections.
KH: Thank you, it's nice to really think hard about these works that I love so much.
NL: Thank you. It was a great opportunity for me to do the same.
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The Rainbow Two is open through November 6, 2020. Watch a virtual tour of the exhibition or make a private viewing appointment at Creative Growth.
Visit Ron Veasey’s online viewing room to see available work.
Nancy Lim is the Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMoMA.
Kathleen Henderson is Creative Growth’s Studio Special Projects Coordinator and a Studio Instructor.
Sarah Galender Meyer is Creative Growth’s Gallery Director.