Today we’d like to introduce you to Nellie King Solomon.
Hi Nellie, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
So excited to be here with you and Voyage LA Magazine. Thank you so much for having me. What an honor to be invited to your Hidden Gems Around Los Angeles. Wow!
I’m a painter, native to Californian, educated in Architect at Cooper Union in NYC. I’ve lived and worked internationally. I have LA family with deep Hollywood roots. However, my daughter Fia, age 15, and I moved to LA in 2019, right before the pandemic.
I just mounted my second museum exhibition, this time a home game, a MuseumTakeOver with my mom Barbara Stauffacher Solomon at MarinMOCA, replete with Supergraphics I designed on a 1967 Ford Econoline van.
In 2019-2020 we mounted our first two-person museum exhibition at SMOCA Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona. At that time I started working with a new art dealer in Phoenix, Bentley Gallery.
New beginnings in LA bring new unfolding friendships stemming from the making world of LA. I call making new friends in here “pulling up carrot” it feels so easy.
I’m painting for a summer solo exhibition in Downtown Berlin, the space is so big I’ve invited my friend, Daniela Soberman a brilliant brutalist sculptor, to show with me for the second time. I featured her work at PIPELINE my Project Space in my Bendix studio.
Simultaneously, I’m working on a large exterior commission for Fairfax and Melrose! A 60-foot long 10-foot high vinyl wall print from a painting. A magenta explosion of horizontality and magic bursting forth with the flow of traffic-joy and emptiness overflowing. The original of this magenta work will be simultaneously exhibited in Berlin. Prints will be available.
New Year’s Eve mid-pandemic I moved into a truly inspiring studio space in the Bendix Building DTLA. It’s glamorous and shockingly the same price as my previous dark Inglewood space. I’m so grateful that I moved to LA when I did.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
Haha… easy or smooth are not words I use to describe this journey. I guess the main lessons I’ve learned are perseverance and humor. I guess I’ve really doubled down on this whole life thing—sure, I’m a careerist—I wanted (and continue to want) to be a painter of the highest caliber. I also knew that a career alone wouldn’t be enough for me. Both of my parents are careerists, I saw that career wasn’t enough to make them happy. So I also wanted a kid, a sense of family. People won’t say this, choosing to have a kid, especially for women, is often seen as a threat to the seriousness of a career for a woman in the art world. I did it anyway.
I raised my daughter in my home region of the Bay Area before coming to LA. In the end, I’m grateful that I wasn’t in LA in my vulnerable 20s. I was able to focus on Fia as I raised her solo in a cottage in Sausalito when she was little as if it was the ’70s. There’s a strength we now carry together in our love and joy that is portable, we are each other’s home. Fia is a singer-songwriter and a really good writer. This bond we’ve invested in over the last 15 years is portable and has made me a stronger painter and stronger person.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Well, I’m most excited about what I’m working on. I’m psyched about my current Diamond Clouds series of paintings—imagine Monet’s water lilies, William Turner’s storm paintings, Anselm Kiefer’s burned-out fields and lead books, Cy Twombly’s raw scribbles, Joseph Beuys’s rocks, and Joan Mitchell’s abandon—I’m calling on silvery winters, toxic landscapes, and the harshness of fluorescent skies to evoke the threat of corruption—they are charged, magical, and elusive.
I recently had an experience that gave rise to these new Diamond Clouds works. I’ve been going to Friday evening Orthodox Shabbat. I was swimming in the bottom of their unheated pool, eyes wide open in goggles, I was enveloped in the emptiness and the slowness, considering my next painting. The water was my elixir. After I reentered the house for the lighting of the candles and prayers, I walked in on a Torah teaching being given to my daughter; “in the beginning, there were minerals and minerals didn’t need anything to exist.” This stuck with me, like the bottom of the pool, a primordial beginning of everything. “The minerals had no motion.” I want to give these minerals to the wind in these paintings.
New Diamond Clouds paintings are coming from: the minerals, the bottom of the pool, and “that moment of just waking when you are regathering your soul from the light”.
Recently, I was interviewed for an LA long-form podcast. The interviewer, a great painter, was so right when he asked me, “Do you make your paintings from that moment of just waking up?” That question was the catalyst for this series. So, you never know what an interview like this one can lead to… haha.
I’m looking forward to getting back into the studio to work on my next big 8 x 8 foot painting. I love being in the middle of the big paintings: that is where I find my voice, it’s where I understand the gestalt of a series and where I’m going. There’s a responsibility, risk, and freedom in making those big paintings.
I work flat a 9 x 9 foot table on Mylar, a drafting vellum, with an arsenal of custom tools made of glass, wood, and rubber, tools I have developed over the years. I also use unconventional liquids and powdered materials to paint with. Coming out of Cooper Union Architecture, a very conceptual and material-based program, I was taught to slice and dice my ideas and reconsider materials—so that’s where some of my process comes from. I need to find a new glass artist to make new glass tools.
I have some very experimental technical processes I’m about to explore for the first time in the studio. I’m not ready to talk about them yet. I’m most interested in the work if I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
It’s safe, to the point of cliché, to say that all fields are moving in a digital direction. Art of course is no exception with AI etc. I don’t think I’m the one to add to this discourse, either in an interview or likely in my next bodies of work. You never know.
I think what I have to give is in linking the hand, eye, and the soul. I think there will increasingly be a part of humanity that craves that touch.
I also think that art will remain an evermore vital conduit for people to know each other, meet each other, and to grow their social circles. It has the power to become the opposite of estranged. In a digital age of isolation, art is an excuse to congregate, to see, to be provoked to think and feel quite simply.
Contact Info:
- Website: nelliekingsolomon.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nelliekingsolomon
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Nellie-King-Solomon-440669806465129/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp5JgGPtdmUJv7PyK4PbuvQ
Image Credits
Daniel Dent Saiji Ishiguro Steve McAghon Nellie King Solomon
