FIT TO PRINT / VOL 1
Afternoon Light is pleased to introduce FIT TO PRINT / VOL. 1, a first offering in an ongoing series of limited-edition prints sourced from a diverse collective of our favorite artists and creators.
Curating a “just right” selection of art for your home is a personal journey, one that can be tricky though joyous. You want cohesion, but also spontaneity. You want to slowly find things along the path of life that speak to you, but you also need stuff on your walls now. To help the process, we’re pleased to present a curation of images in partnership with 1000Museums, who are dedicated to producing the highest quality made-to-order reproductions of fine art on the market today. These prints utilize pigmented, non-toxic and environmentally friendly ink upon 100% acid-free cotton fine art paper, and each is custom fitted in handmade wood frames with precision-cut, acid-free mat boards behind UV-blocking, semi gloss, acrylic glass. Ready to hang and be arranged to your heart’s desire, positioned in the prime spot of each room or congregated in a hallway. FIT TO PRINT is a celebration of multitudes, an eclectic combination of creative minds, colors, textures and mediums, thoughtfully selected to elevate your space.
FIT TO PRINT / Vol. 1 features five artists we love: Naomi Clark, Ginny Sims, Nathan Brown, Danielle Kroll and Scott Patt. Read about their work below and shop the collection here.
NAOMI CLARK
Naomi Clark received her MFA from Pratt Institute and is a co-Founder of Fort Makers, the multidisciplinary and immersive art brand, who has shown extensively in the US and abroad. Employing bold, inventive coloration, an accumulation of fragmented closed forms and clever brushwork, Clark builds her compositions with both familiar and novel organizing structures. Percolating with jubilant energy, audacity, and a stew of impastoed pigments, Clark’s surfaces provide a “resting place for the mind free from judgment where the viewer returns to the excitement felt in childhood where creativity reigns and ideas begin.”
AL: Can you tell us about the inspiration behind this piece?
NC: I did this piece when I was home in Colorado. I am consistently inspired by the bright light in Colorado. It illuminates and articulates color in a way I have not seen elsewhere. I think the thin dry air makes the atmosphere almost sharpen color and image. When I am painting, I am inspired by my surroundings and like many painters before me, the light.
AL: I’m fascinated by your usage of colors and shapes. When conceptualizing and creating this piece, how did you approach selecting these specific elements?
NC: I work with a vocabulary of shapes that repeat throughout my work. I consider it a kind of abstract vocabulary. I believe whole heartily in the power of abstraction and how it expands the mind. When I am working the shapes become a sort of improvisation. I know the notes but each piece is a unique expression of the many combinations of shapes that make up my language. My work is communication without the written word. I hope when my work is viewed it can inspire and recall unique expressions in each viewer.
Rainbow Lake By Naomi S Clark
DANIELLE KROLL
Danielle lives in the Catskill mountains in upstate New York. She started painting at nine years old, when she won acrylic lessons from a local artist, and has been painting ever since. She attended Tyler School of Art where she received a BFA in graphic design and illustration. Danielle’s artwork has appeared on homewares, stationery and clothing and she is the author of the book “Pacific Coasting.” She is inspired by Mother Nature, childhood memories, thrift shops, and the delights of everyday life.
AL: Tell us about the flowers that you captured in the piece. How did you decide what types of flowers you wanted to include?
DK: This past summer I was walking through Woodstock with a friend and picked up a gorgeous bouquet, mostly roses and peonies. I also had carnations and morning glory growing in my garden so I wanted to document them all in a painting of the floral abundance in June.
AL: There are so many stunning colors in this piece. How did you select the color palette? Are there colors that you typically gravitate towards when creating or does the palette differ every time?
DK: There are certain combinations that I love to use over and over, like light pink and green, but mostly each painting has its own unique palette. I do go through periods where I’m heavy on one color and I’d say I’m in a yellow phase at the moment. For this painting, I put in the sunny yellow background first then painted the flower colors based on the palette of the bouquet.
Sun Candy by Danielle Kroll
NATHAN BROWN
Originally from Los Angeles, Nathan relocated to Nashville when he was 11, and endured a major culture shock. Embracing change through skateboarding, painting graffiti and traveling as a sponsored team rider motivated him artistically. In the late 90’s he drew inspiration from those experiences plus gradient color palettes in nature and the structural lines of urban architecture, Brown has produced over 100 large scale commissioned murals for communities around the country and for brands such as Red Bull, Patagonia, Google, Spotify and more. His goals have remained constant; to bring people, places and communities together through public art, and to create new spaces where there were none before. Brown is currently based in Chattanooga, TN.
Traversing Dimension by Nathan Brown
AL: What lessons did you learn from painting graffiti that you apply to your work today? Who are your biggest influences, in graffiti scenes and beyond?
NB: I honestly think most things I learned from painting graffiti and skateboarding most of my life, have enabled me to make a living as a mural artist. I feel I learned the importance of networking - meeting graffiti artists and skateboarders from all over the country & world - seeing different artists styles in person, different ways artists go about painting in the streets in big and small cities, doing hard stressful and sometimes dangerous work in a timely manner.
I'd say I was really influenced early on in graffiti by REVOK, who taught me lettering and took me painting a handful of times. Barry Mcgee was also catalyst for me from graffiti to street art, seeing his early work in skate magazines, painting screws and faces in the streets. Seeing artists paint other things besides graff letters and typical graff characters really inspired me to think beyond graffiti. Like Shepard Fairey, who I started seeing these tiny ads in skate magazines to send a self-addressed stamped envelope to get some stickers back in 92' which happened to be some of the original Obey work he was doing.
Currently artists like Felipe Pantone, Okuda, CJ Henry, Guido Van Helton, Swoon and too many others to name are truly inspiring to me.
AL: Your background is primarily rooted in creating large scale public art works like murals. How do you approach smaller works such as this one, that are meant for private, indoor spaces? Are there many differences or mostly similarities in the way you conceptualize and create the artwork?
NB: My prints and studio paintings are usually my way of figuring out my large-scale public murals. I can experiment and try new things without messing up a huge wall. I'd say the biggest difference between my studio work (prints / paintings) and my mural work is that the walls I paint are always different, crazy textures, weird weather, different climates, traffic, onsite conversations with strangers and all sorts of things inspire the end product. My studio work is mainly the things I think about when I'm painting murals, that I really want to try in a more controlled environment. Painting and creating smaller scale work has always been a challenge for me; I’ve always been better at seeing something at large scale and I usually only create a handful of paintings and prints a year - but I'm working on that!
GINNY SIMS
Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Ginny Sims was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas and holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Sims apprenticed to Mike Dodd in Somerset, England and has worked at potteries in Italy and Scotland. In addition to being a working artist and mother, Sims also teaches ceramics and art history at Minneapolis College while working on her studio practice of highly narrative functional and sculptural objects. For inspiration, she looks to different moments in ceramic history and incorporates this cultural information with present day social and political experiences. For Sims, pottery is a reflective, invisible, critical and necessary material object of culture whose very existence is testament to the human being in their environment.
Still Life In Blue by Ginny Sims
AL: You primarily work in ceramics. I’m interested by the fact that in this painting, ceramic objects are still pictured. What draws you to creating functional objects, both in paintings and ceramics?
GS: I have lived my life soaking up a lot of visual information in the realm of ceramics and vessels in general. It is a pretty normal story: I took a pottery class in high school and it provided me with my first artistic outlet. It also provided a portal into the world of looking at and understanding other people’s art and choices. In my twenties I spent a lot of time traveling alone, seeking out ceramics opportunities. I worked as an assistant and production worker in Italy, Scotland and England. Those experiences provided me with the knowledge and confidence to commit to choosing a life of working in clay.
The paintings have only come recently. When I have time and space, I like to create rooms where aspects of a domestic space, along with my pottery and sculptures unfold. The paintings were a way for me to plan or visualize my larger installations and then just sort of evolved into smaller studies, which I enjoyed on their own, as paintings. I also wanted more ways of playing with color, at least in unexpected and unpredictable ways. I consider the paintings as a satisfying part of my practice, but they also are a productive way for me to reflect and rest and plan. My studio is small, and I while I wait for ceramics to dry or be fired in the kiln, painting and drawing are a nice reprieve.
AL: I love the colorful objects that stand out against the predominantly blue backdrop of this piece - the egg cup and the electrical outlet particularly caught my attention. How do you decide what details to include in a domestic still life scene such as this one?
GS: I think my interest in interior spaces come out here. I tried for a while drawing rooms on pots, and that didn’t do it for me really. The paintings—experimenting with colors and different objects, are a way for me to draw on those interests in spaces. Over time I have become more interested in other mediums and moments in art history, particularly with French painters: Matisse, Cézanne and Pierre Bonard. Looking at Matisse has helped me to work in the two- dimensional. His painting The Red Studio is a favorite, I think about it a lot. In my own work I love how the composition and colors become problem solving. I like to stop and start them to see what comes next. Always unpredictable, it is also a great way to stop and start something, as life with kids will have you do.
SCOTT PATT
Scott Patt is an artist whose work employs bold graphics, symbols, typography and personal experiences to confront and satirize aspects of the human condition. Patt utilizes the power of the visual and the verbal to simplify, connect and inspire. Influenced by the folk art he encountered in his hometown of Allentown, PA, and the primary colors of post-pop consumerism, Patt’s work explores everyday concepts from luck to love, sexuality to space and hope to happiness. Concurrent to his art career, Patt has worked as a designer and creative lead at brands like Cole Haan, Nike, Converse, and Giorgio Armani; work that continually reinforces the importance of innovation, story, connectivity and a healthy sense of humor within his art. Patt’s paintings, sculptures and installations have been exhibited around the world, from New York to Japan, with recent exhibitions at Winston Wächter Fine Art in NYC, Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art in San Francisco, CA and 212 Gallery in Aspen, CO.
Patt recently completed an epic painting-a-day project entitled “Bigger. Smaller. Funnier.” in which he ideated, sketched, painted, commercialized, and virtually exhibited (via social media) an original conceptual painting daily. Each painting documents the internal and external ups and downs of our shared everyday experience of the human condition.
Speaking on his Bigger, Smaller, Funnier series, Scott says:
SP: I started drawing out some sketches one day and that…influence of posters, advertising, that type of vibe, started to unearth from all these sketches. I was doing these miniature pieces and it started to become something.
For BSF, social media allows for this different kind of exhibition, where it becomes almost the exhibition before the exhibition. It’s an alive experience over this 365 days, and then at the end of the 365 there’s a second life to the program.
I’ve always been somebody who is very driven by the epic quest. And for me that forces me into doing. When I started sketching more and creating more, I wanted something that felt big.
I’ve already started some larger pieces for it and to have it grow into a physical environment, bringing this 365 year of stories into some kind of book or physical form, there’s a lot of really exciting things. But the impetus of these being sketches for works down the road or ideas, are just seeds planted for 365 days. I really want to see those seeds grow into something special for the future.
You can live in a vacuum if you want, but what’s the joy of making work if you’re not sharing it and connecting to other people and having this reciprocation of ideas and love and that energy of doing stuff?
YOU by Scott Brown
Words and interviews by Kai Williams