John Randall Nelson

Biography

Nelson began developing his visual style as a freelance illustrator in the 1990s, with work included in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone. In the 2000s, Nelson’s career as a painter began to take root. He completed his Master of Fine Arts degree at Arizona State University in 1995. In his 1999 show In Process at ASU, he began to develop the personal language of symbols and archetypes for which he is now known. Nelson, as a nationally exhibited artist, has a long-standing reputation for his honed development of urban-neo-folk icons and characters. The objects, text and characters that have repeatedly appeared in his artistic oeuvre have become an identifiable vocabulary for his work.

Two women are inspiration for Nelson’s most recent work. One was a prominent art dealer in New York City who spearheaded the art movement known as Pattern and Decoration. The other made international headlines for running over her husband after an argument about his failure to vote in the 2012 presidential election. The one thing these two different women share is their name: Holly Solomon. Solomon the art dealer was one of Nelson’s major influences, helping him find his style, which often features shapes, patterns, and words. His 2013 exhibition title “Polka Dots for Holly Solomon," is fitting. Based heavily on pattern and decoration, Nelson uses the polka dot as both object and non-object, while incorporating “affirmations” as text jargon and a nod to society’s obsession with the pursuit of happiness. Taking its cue from its name, Polka Dots For Holly Solomon is a large-scale installation of polka dot patterns and subliminal messages presented across an array of two-dimensional and three-dimensional surfaces. Nelson says that the intention behind his new work is to “mean something and mean nothing at all. I like to think of it as ‘non-conceptualism’.”

Over the past 15 years, Nelson has actively shown in group and solo shows in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Dallas, Santa Fe, and Phoenix. One of his most ambitious shows took place at Bentley Projects warehouse space in Phoenix in 2005 and featured a mixed media re-imagining of life in a transient hotel using video, large scale installation, painting and collaboration with writer Eric Susser. His paintings are included in the private collections of musicians Danny Elfman and John Legend and the corporate collections of Visa, Apple, Intel, and Haarmann-Reimer Corp.

Nelson began his career as a public artist with Harry above the Crowd, a 35-foot sculpture commissioned by the City of Tempe. Since then he has designed and produced over 15 public art projects including commissions for Sky Harbor International Airport, Wells Fargo Bank, and the BIO5 Institute at the University of Arizona.

Nelson plays in Bucky's Experimental Instrumentations with artist-musicians Alan Jones and Joe Willie Smith. The noise band features open improvisation using artist-designed instruments and found sounds.

Nelson is an adjunct professor of painting at Phoenix College.

Works

Nelson's work revolves around a personal language of symbols and archetypes. The subjects of the paintings change from piece to piece and from project to project but the core of the work stems from his own personal lexicon of archetypal symbols. Nelson's work from 2000-2010 touches on Chicago Imagism, Funk Art, and outsider art, emphasizing simplified images. The works are rich in materiality. Surfaces are thick with densely saturated pigments and heavily worked with layers of drawing...even the drawings have dimension, with the paper lifting off its backing. As Kathryn M. Davis writes in ArtNews, Nelson’s “sly paintings conjure cartoons, found signage, and modern hieroglyphs, and tie them together with lusciously patinated surfaces. Nelson describes his own process: “The unconscious is like a reservoir. Themes emerge, some that are humorous, others that are cryptic and vague.” His work presents an idiosyncratic slant on the human figure and a psychological take on human nature. Though not wholly human the beings in Nelson's artwork reflect the shifting role of the subconscious self, part animal and part human, part nature and part culture.