Welcome to Short Answer Sunday, an interview series where I ask artists, art adjacent individuals, and other interesting, creative people the same set of questions. With the intent of getting to know the person behind the artwork as well generating new avenues to artistic discovery, participants respond with a few words or an artist’s name, always with the opportunity to elaborate if they wish!
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You guys, I’m delighted to break the radio silence with this banger of a Short Answer Sunday with artist and professor Nathan Mullins. I first met Nathan in the ballpark (pun intended) of 2014-2015, when I was invited back to American University as a visiting artist. He was a grad student at the time, and even then, his paintings were ridiculously, crushingly, enviably good. I remember his studio walls being filled with small to mid-size canvases, fragments of painted figures and still lifes depicting images and objects of varying significance (the one that continues to stick with me most is a painting of an Utz chip bag). Many of these paintings were inspired by scenes described in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (one of my top ten books, if I kept a top ten), although they weren’t really about DFW’s tome so much as they were an excuse to make some really killer paintings. Smart and a little weird, they gave me that feeling I get when I’m in front of really great art, which I can only vaguely describe as my heart getting warm and expanding (glowing? inflating?).
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Nathan Mullins, Utz 1, 2015, oil on canvas, 49 x 35 in. |
Last month, Nathan drove from southern Mississippi to central Virginia to install Double Play, a stunning solo exhibition of his recent paintings at the university where I teach. The show features paintings whose compositions are pulled from screen grabs of video footage depicting baseball icons from the 1980s and 90s. When we look at Nathan’s recent paintings, our big, beautiful, and often wrong brains tell us we’re looking at pictures of baseball. And we are, in a sense, but in that wonderful “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” kind of way. What we’re actually looking at are paintings, paintings in which baseball is the initial hook, the first layer of meaning, before (if we allow it) the deeper stuff starts to burble upward. Next come thoughts about color, depth, flatness, density, mark, movement, and light. The paintings are formal as hell (and I am a form guy). Equal parts lovely, funny, and strange, Nathan’s paintings often hinge on unexpected compositional cropping or moments of absurdity, like the infamous Randy Johnson pitch that killed a bird. The back n’ forth push/pull between form and subject opens up space for ruminations on nostalgia, Americana, masculinity, race, celebrity, and the collective versus the individual.
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Nathan Mullins, Marmaduke III-World Series ‘91, 2026, oil on canvas, 5 x7 inches |
I recently listened to an interview with Roberta Smith where she describes writing art criticism as being like building a brick wall, then keeping only the bricks you absolutely need to hold the wall up and I’ve been thinking about that in relation to Nathan’s paintings. Every mark feels necessary, full of intention and backed by the kind of painterly prowess that comes from knowing, in your body and soul rather than purely intellectually, exactly what you’re doing. If you find your body and soul in central Virginia before December 7, 2026, I hope you’ll stop by Longwood University’s Bedford Gallery to see Nathan’s show.
For more about Nathan and his work, go to his website and find him on Instagram. I’m thrilled to share this Short Answer Sunday with Nathan Mullins:
Name: Nathan Mullins
Occupation: Assistant Teaching Professor of Art in Foundations at the University of Southern Mississippi
Astrological data: Libra
Hometown: Clarksdale, MS
Current location: Petal, MS
Other than Instagram, how do you find new-to-you artists?
Other artists telling me about them. It’s unfortunate that artcritical.com is no longer running.
An artwork that makes you laugh?
Wrecks 2 by Alex Katz, from 1975. This 6 ½ foot tall painting of a dog’s face lives at the High Museum in Atlanta. I defy you to stand in front of this and not lose it.
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Alex Katz, Wrecks 2, 1975, oil on linen, 77 5/8 x 90 inches image source |
An artwork that makes you cry?
n/a
Most underrated artist?
I’ll just use this to shamelessly plug my friends. Check out Tristan Barlow , Agnieszka Katz Barlow, and Greg Gandy. Three excellent painters who deserve more recognition.
An artwork that you’d like to live inside for a week?
Probably any Fairfield Porter. I’d love to relax and paint at his house for a week.
An artist whose work you can’t stop thinking about?
The Balthus show Cats and Girls at The Met in 2013 had this one painting, “Thérèse,” from 1939. There are two with the same title. I’m thinking of the one featuring nearly exposed canvas with a wash of like raw sienna. Her face is made with that single pass of underpainting as the shadow and the light is built up with relatively thick paint. I’ve never not thought about the simultaneous depth and flatness created in that portrait. Hans Hoffmann’s push and pull in figurative work.
An artwork that feels like a warm hug?
Every painting by Takuya Yoshida. It’s been fifteen years or so since I last saw Tak. Would love to visit and see his work in Japan.
What’s your favorite characteristic in an artwork?
I get excited when paintings reveal how they were made. Like seeing an economy of marks that make something much more complex.
Erotic artwork? (Ed. note: this is a multiple choice question)
Yes: ✅
What’s an artwork that doesn’t look like art?
Michael Scoggins’ work. Those giant notebook pages are something else.
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Michael Scoggins, Dear Love, 2022, Graphite, artist crayon, colored pencil on paper, 67 x 51 in. image source |
What’s an artwork that you suspect that you shouldn’t like, but you do (guilty pleasure)?
Alberto Vargas. Pin-up artist. He did the cover art for The Cars album Candy-O.
What’s an artwork that you secretly hate?
It’s a secret.
Most insane art piece?
That I’ve seen? Probably James Turrell’s 2013 installation at the Guggenheim.
Fav monograph or art book?
Right now, it’s probably Lois Dodd from Lund Humphries’ Contemporary Painters series.
Fav museum or gallery in your current location?
Not exactly a lot of choice here in southern Mississippi, but the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel, MS is a gem of a small collection, and admission is free!
Last exhibition you saw irl?
Unstable Atmospheres, a two-hander at the artist-run gallery The Front in New Orleans, featuring excellent paintings by Sarah Cancienne and Augustus Hoffman.
An artwork that packs a spiritual punch?
The entirety of the Bread and Puppet Museum in Glover, VT. Every square inch of the barn is covered in art. If art is about the expression of the human spirit, this might be the most powerful work of art I’ve ever seen. Up there with Duccio’s “Maestà” in Siena.
An artwork that you’d like to see before you die?
All of the Titians that I haven’t seen yet and/or Roden Crater.
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James Turrell’s Roden Crater image source |
What art material do you love to nerd out on?
Zecchi oil paint, made in Florence.
What was the last thing that you listened to in the studio?
The new stereo mix of Rubber Soul… I know, I know.
What’s a book that changed your life?
I almost feel the need to be pre-emptively defensive of this, but The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. It’s easy to reduce Campbell to the Hero’s-Journey-circle-guy and say that he’s over simplifying world religions, but he directly addresses that concern in the book. And reading his other works like The Power of Myth or The Masks of God series reveals just how deeply concerned he is with the specificity and purpose of each myth he’s discussing.
What song, book, podcast or film do you think everyone should know about?
If you want to understand the quagmire we currently find ourselves in re: our collective inability to cope with media and the ways it’s wreaking havoc on our lives and systems, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a pretty good place to start. I mean, for a 60 year old book, it’s eerily prescient.
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Nathan Mullins, born 1989 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, earned his BFA in Art with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting from the University of Southern Mississippi in 2012 before studying for a year at the New York Studio School and earning his MFA in Studio Art from American University in 2015. Mullins's paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Adah Rose Gallery in the D.C. Metro Area and the New York Studio School; and group shows at Auxier Kline Gallery and Wagner College in New York City and the Vilnius Academy of Art in Lithuania. His work was published in New American Paintings 142, and his shows have been reviewed in The Washington Post and Nuvo Magazine. In 2022, his drawings were included in Dustin Pearson's poetry collection A Season in Hell with Rimbaud, published by BOA Editions. He has been awarded two Individual Artist Mini-Grants from the Mississippi Arts Commission, most recently in support of his residency stay at the Vermont Studio Center this past May. Mullins is an Eagle Scout. He lives with his partner Dr. Keri Miller and their two cats in Petal, Mississippi and teaches foundations drawing and design classes at The University of Southern Mississippi.
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