Russell Nachman

Russell Nachman paints a lucid dream. Where have all the hippies gone? —They have abandoned their utopias.

Nachman’s out-of-body visitation of that Woodstock nation expands watercolor across white paper—hugely and microcosmically—through flower-power litter in the overgrown grass to meditation pods and cosmic energy pyramids soaring empty in the sky. No one is home.

Nachman chooses to title his first one-person show at Jack the Pelican “Träd, Gräs, och Stenar” (Trees, Grass and Stones), after the Swedish psychedelic jam band of the late 60s–early 70s. “Their home-grown music,” he writes, “has an improvisational intimacy that evokes utopian, commune style living and optimism.” His work is a matrix of references to the period, some more obscure than others—including the Swiss Earth Architecture movement, the Baader-Meinhof group and the Weathermen, Carlos Castaneda and peyote culture in general, Richard Brautigan, Easy Rider, Amon Düül (a German Krautrock band), Robert Smithson, Herbert Marcuse, Roger Dean’s covers for progressive rock bands (including Yes) and Mexican and Navaho rugs. He was a kid in hippy-hotbed Boulder, Colorado in this period and this was the culture. He’s not interested in them conceptually, though. —For him, it’s just so much shelf memorabilia.

As a budding artist, a decade ago, Nachman, like many of his contemporaries, embraced the Postwar styles, concepts and techniques he learned in art school. When he found his subject, however—utopias are as fragile as they are innocent—he realized it called for a new pictorial language. His journey took him from children’s book illustration (note the resemblance to Beatrix Potter) to the PreRaphaelites, who similarly cast off their immediate academic models in their move toward ‘innocence;’ and finally to the great opium-inspired British Faerie Painters of the late-nineteenth century. Watercolor on virgin white paper, in all its sweet and airy wistfulness, was a natural for him. —But for all the quaintness of his technique and artistic models, Nachman’s rendition is truly epic. This is modern scale—these are biggest watercolors you’ve ever seen. And his virtue of being too polite, where muscle could have been, is in the end very naughty.

Russell Nachman’s first solo show, in 1998 at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, was reviewed in Art Issues. His next solo, at Gallery 16, also in San Francisco, was reviewed in Art in America. His premiere solo in NYC was at White Columns in 2003. In January 2005, he had a solo at Mixed Greens. He first showed with Jack the Pelican in David Gibson’s “Culture Vulture” and was our featured artist at Scope Miami, also in 2005.