Interview 02/01/2022

His approach to abstraction developed through a period of wide experimentation, including a foray into darkroom photography. Striving for a balance between expression and playfulness, the formal qualities of Flink’s work manifest spatial tension evocative of movement.

Flink’s aesthetic vocabulary and recent work involves a searching for emotive and pure gestures that suggest a relationship with other compositional elements. In some cases, the work references a domestic environment indicated by machine sewn stitch-work, while at other times it is furniture that has been altered or disassembled. His pieces often also imply an outside world or experience of urban landscape. Just as often, the evidence of his mark making becomes its own compositional subject. Flink creates his work and lives with his family in Saint Paul.

What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?

“I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. I wasn't the most academically perfect student in secondary school, although I excelled in the graphic arts. I basically skipped my last year of high school and went to art school. I had only just turned seventeen when I started at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. This was when everything changed for me. I took my study of painting and drawing seriously, although I was always much younger than my schoolmates. In my sophomore and junior years, I received scholarship awards for merit competitions from the college.
I was taught about compositional language and the importance of shape and design. This stuck with me, especially the ideas of two of the fine arts faculty staff, Ari Munzner and David Rich. I minored in printmaking.
At one point I moved into a studio space above a shoe store in Minneapolis. Across the street was a defunct pornographic bookstore. I was on the third floor with windows overlooking the street. You'd see everything. Motorcycle crashes. Cars driving on fire. Cars moving with only three wheels. Big fights. Lots of gun fire. The neighborhood of the studio was dangerous, but the space was cheap and large.
For the most part, the building was great, a real artist's enclave. There were all kinds of other artists around: puppeteers, musicians, sculptors, media artists, and painters. There was also a really bad dentist on the second floor.
I began my career as a figurative painter. I was also interested in landscape, and spent many afternoons painting urban landscapes on the roof of the building. We hosted model drawing co-ops for our intimate artist community.
I began to look for artistic directions that expanded the scope of my work. I started working with collage after a studio visit with Mel Smith, a local artist. Much of the abstraction I developed came about through collage strategies. Later, I became interested in photography and converted the bathroom at the shoe store into a darkroom. I fell in love with how images develop and appear in the darkroom.
I was both working in the shoe store as a part time receiving clerk by day, and as a broiler chef at a steakhouse downtown by night. I'd ride the bus home from work at midnight and draw a self portrait in charcoal as a warm up, and paint late into the night.
I later spent a month at a residency program in Vermont. This was a period of intense experimentation where I was working in figurative and abstract styles, drawing from the model, sketching, and plein air painting and drawing. I had a partial scholarship, but also had an easy work assignment in the kitchen of the place part-time. On the last night we broke into the kitchen and made pizzas from scratch for everybody. It was two a.m. and flour was all over the place after all were fed. The next day the chef was PO'ed!”

What inspires you?

“I'm inspired to look at new developments in art. The kind of thing where you look at it and think ‘What the hell is this?’ Being challenged by an artist to move outside of my comfort zone and understanding of what art can be, is a good thing.
Walking around the lower east side of NYC and seeing what is in the galleries is fantastic. I love doing studio visits with friends and collaborating on exhibition projects.
The history of painting can be traced to aesthetic revolutions where each generation of artists challenges the values of the last. What were previously undervalued formal attributes becomes a new focus, within all the various ‘isms’. This is somewhat of a race to not care about the ‘correct’ way to paint. It keeps going.
I see this same idea playing out on a different scale in the work of contemporary artists. Very specific attention might be placed on some formal or conceptual aspects while others are totally ignored. My work operates on a few different levels, but I'm basically doing the same thing. There's a lot of bullshit out there too.
I have many interests that feed into my art process. I'm a fanatic about skiing and I love the winter and cold weather in Minnesota. It brings an abundance of fresh air and studio time.”

What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?

“One facet of my work is the way that thematic information is conveyed visually within an artwork. Narratives are open ended. Perhaps in the same way someone might read graffiti on a train passing by.
Another facet is American consumerism and its critique. This manifests both in terms of material and content choices. I address various aspects: throw away culture, the fake-ness of social media, and the abundance of dysfunctional product packaging. I've found ways to recycle materials, to mitigate my own waste, to the effect that what I make isn't a result of a shopping cart full of materials from the art supply store.
The domestic experience is a related theme to consumerism. We do everything in our homes, and in this way, the work points toward something tangible. The viewer brings their own interpretation and judgment, peering out into the world from an inner place.
As part of this inner world, a person's (or my own) memory factors into the work as a component of identity. There is always a sense of space in my work connected to growing up in Minnesota. This also connects to my familial roots, the cultural connections to Sweden and Norway. The ideals of Scandinavian life are always inside it someplace.”

Which current art world trends are you following?

“I follow contemporary artists and exhibition news in addition to interacting in the art community locally in Minneapolis and St Paul. There are a number of friends living around the country that I follow, people I grew up with or knew in college or other friends. I keep up with a number of galleries in New York, LA and in Europe as well. I think there is some pretty interesting painting happening in Germany. But there is so much else of interest happening all over too - rural places, or your backyard.”

How would you describe your work?

“It is evocative and emotive. It involves a process of remembering. Color choice and sometimes language elements serve to give the viewer cues, but the literalness of the work is not easily apparent. I'm trying to cultivate a natural and automatic way of drawing. Adding symbols or graphics from things I might draw in high school is like time traveling backward and trying to summon things I've forgotten. It is personal. I don't deliberately try to obscure things, but I reveal as much as I am aware of.
For example, a recent piece titled ‘Pizza Kills’ is an assemblage of two different sheets of canvas that I painted with Montana paint and acrylic. I drew this peace symbol, and then it occurred to me how much it looks like a pizza in an absurd way. So I wrote pizza kills with a pink sharpie. America today is so hyper-critical of diets and so forth, but aren't we hypocritical – It's all so confusing right? The media is so saturated with advertising to make us consume even more.”

Which artists influence you most?

"I'm basically influenced by everything – there is so much, but always changing too.
Some favorites, in no particular order: Basquiat, Twombly, Guston, Rauschenberg, the Bay Area painters, Scandinavian fiber artists, Richter, Keith Haring, Sterling Ruby, Wade Guyton, Jessica Stockholder, Nairy Baghramian, Christopher Wool, Mark Bradford, Albert Oehlen, Jenny Brosinski, Joyce Pensato, Ricardo Passeporte, Richie Culver, Taylor A White, Wolfgang Voegele, Angela Delacruz. So many more, not to mention friends.
I am always discovering new artists I love. The contemporary artists that I follow tend to work with a range of themes and styles that interest me.
Some of these artists also approach sculpture in such a profound and unique way.”

What process, materials, techniques, etc., do you use to create your artwork?

“Over the last year, I have started by painting on raw, un-stretched fabric. I then select sections of the painting in progress that interest me and cut them apart. Sometimes it is a matter of removing an area that isn't working, like editing.
Other times, I do a pinned-together mock up. I sew the constituent parts together with an old steel Morse machine from the 1950's. Often I use a bright colored thread, like neon orange. I like it to be apparent that it is stitched.
To do the stretching onto the support, I will lay out the canvas on an eight by eight foot table I use for working on my pieces. The canvas is face down. With a staple gun I pull and stretch the sewn sections according to the elasticity of the fabric. It is a magical moment when I turn the piece over and see the entire image completed for the first time with the crisp corners of the support. It is similar to being in a darkroom and a photographic image suddenly appears. Oftentimes, the first few attempts on a piece don't work out and I end up pulling out all the staples. I spend a lot of time pulling out staples by hand with a screwdriver and pliers. Much of the works get cut apart and redesigned.”

“Sometimes I continue to draw or paint on the pieces until they seem complete. Often a pattern or hue of a found scrap of fabric suggests a mood or nostalgia, or something visceral from my current world. In many of the pieces I reuse certain tropes that I become curiously fixated upon. These are often meant to contextualize the work through referencing elements of my personal history, such as certain drawings or doodles I would do in my school years.”

What is your creative process like?

“The works I make are all about surprising myself with unlikely or unexpected combinations of mark, color, image, and pattern. Although I approach my work as a painting, my process is sort of the reverse of traditional painting technique.
Although I make sculpture, for the last couple years I have mostly been focused on making painting-like wall pieces out of stitched canvas and fabric. Initially I began cutting apart paintings with a fairly even coating of oil paint, consisting of several layers of linseed oil glazing. I burned through the motor of one of my heavy duty sewing machines because the surfaces were too thickly coated for the needles to punch through.
I shifted to working with more minimally painted surfaces that allow more precision. I work with a few different types of canvas and linen with differences of weave and color. I also use a variety of found upholstery fabrics.
I judge the success or completion of any given piece intuitively, but it has to come together as a totality, where the piece becomes its own complete universe, with harmonious and oppositional forces at play.”

What does your art mean to you?

“Aesthetically, I am at times aware of the ‘bad’ things in my work. In other words, to create a visual challenge, where it isn’t just a pretty painting, but it has got some meat and guts. Maybe that is a Guston kind of idea, but the artists I follow all do this in one way or another.
It’s important to me to recognize the pureness of the gestures I am making and not try to improve them, kind of a wabi-sabi-esque idea. I combine aspects of memories – intellectual, visual – and synthesize different experiences of being in the world.
Each piece is a discovery and transient, running a little further away, and then looking back.
The discoveries make what came before seem trivial. But then when I look back, it is exciting to see continuity throughout the evolution.”

Please tell us about any previous exhibitions you found noteworthy and wish to share.

“In the early days I attended the Vermont studio center and was able to have my work seen by a diverse group of national and international artists. In Minnesota, I sold some paintings out of a local gallery to a professional baseball player's wife and took the money to travel throughout Italy, Spain, and France.
Later, my girlfriend was a graduate fellow in fine art at Cornell university, and I moved out with her and hung around the campus for two years, ending up being involved in the arts scene in New York. I showed at some local galleries and won an art contest. I drove across the country a lot and spent some time in Chicago bouncing around too.
As a young man I was sponsored in South Korea for my first real solo exhibition, exhibiting about twenty paintings. I was sleeping on the floor of my friend's studio in Pusan, South Korea, a large and dense city. In addition to two Philippine artist friends staying in the same space, I met so many kind and generous South Koreans. They gave me the royal treatment throughout the run of the show – a banner with my name going across the street, a printed catalogue and TV news crews filming the show. Most of the pieces were sold. It was great.”

“Arriving back in Minnesota from New York, my art career went on hiatus for a spell. My time was occupied with the birth of my daughter and fixing up a new house. I took a day job.
For the last ten or so years, my work has branched out into curatorial projects and installations in addition to drawing, painting and sculpture. I received a Knight Foundation grant for a two year curatorial series. I worked with more than 50 nationally recognized artists.
About five years ago I had a solo exhibition at the Nemeth Art Center in Park Rapids Minnesota, which was a really unique experience. The gallery is a beautiful, expansive space in the town’s former county courthouse. Everyone was so welcoming. You feel like the whole town is supporting you.”

“I've had a few solo exhibitions since then in lesser known spaces in the Minneapolis metro area. My most recent solo exhibition last year at the Soo Visual Art Center in Minneapolis, was a transitional moment. This is when sewing began to be a constant in my creative process. I also exhibited a few sculptures from a parallel series of works that examine roles within the domestic experience, utilizing assemblage of reconstructed furniture and demolition material. The exhibition was very challenging because it occurred during Covid lockdowns and restrictions, but I had some great conversations that came out of it.
Upcoming this spring I am excited to have a couple of my works in group exhibition in Athens, Greece.”

Website: www.nathanaelflink.com

Instagram: @nathanaelflink

Nathanael Flink