Today we’d like to introduce you to Nick Zegel.
Nick, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I was born and raised in Southern New Jersey, about 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia. As a kid, I spent countless hours playing in the woods that surrounded my family’s suburban home. When I wasn’t outside, I was hanging with my brother and the neighborhood kids in the basement, glued to the Nintendo. In 1993, I was introduced to skateboarding. Not long after, I started documenting my friends and I skating in the neighborhood.
As I got older and began using the family computer, I started importing and editing the video I was shooting. Around the 7th grade, we got internet access and I began learning how to build a website. Eventually, I figured out how to post short video clips to my website (this was pre-YouTube). At school, I would gather my friends around the library computers and wait ten minutes for a 15 second video clip to load. Once they loaded we would play them over and over showing everyone in the library.
Building and maintaining my website became a serious hobby. The site was constantly evolving, as I was designing new logos and graphics, coding, and adding photography and writing. I accidentally set myself up with all of these problems to solve which pushed me to learn new things every day.
Having found a passion for design and the arts, I graduated high school and prepared to head off to art school. That summer, I came across a local startup surf brand called Jetty. A few recent college graduates had started printing t-shirts and selling them at the local surf shop. I did some research and cold called them offering to help. I built them a new website, free of charge, and started helping with all things design. As I started art school in Boston, I spent my nights and weekends working on everything Jetty.
In 2007, I graduated with a BFA and hoped to make Jetty my full-time hustle. In reality, the company still wasn’t generating enough revenue to pay ourselves so I resorted to taking on freelance work while I continued to help build the brand. In 2010, I was invited to interview with Quiksilver in Huntington Beach, and a month later I made the difficult decision to walk away from Jetty and start my first full-time design job in California.
Since moving to California almost a decade ago, I’ve designed for big and small brands in the action sports industry. Last year I left a full-time art director role with Girl Skateboards (Crailtap) to setup my own design studio and take on new creative opportunities.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
My work has many faces and I imagine all of my pursuits sitting under a simple ideology, anything is possible and do your best. I’m working to find more clarity and focus on the work I enjoy the most while simultaneously building my design studio, NICK.
NICK is producing commercial work for clients like New Balance, while also collaborating with like-minded creatives to tackle a wide range of projects. As an art director and designer, I love to help clients solve problems through concept-driven design.
As an individual and an artist, I approach life with a heightened level of curiosity and desire to learn new things and explore new ideas. I enjoy painting and drawing, taking photographs, publishing zines, and dreaming up ideas in hopes of making them reality. I’m drawn to new technologies and how they can be applied to make and design new things and experiences.
While I like to wear a lot of hats, I am also trying to collaborate more often and engage with my local creative community. This is a relatively new shift for me, one born of necessity, to find balance in life and work.
How can artists connect with other artists?
Earlier this year I organized a Taco Bell Drawing Club in Long Beach, as a tribute to the late Jason Polan. It has been a great source of joy coming together with strangers and friends to draw once a week. If you’d like to come out and draw that is a great way to support and connect with creatives. The weekly meetings are currently on hold due to the health crisis but I look forward to getting back to our weekly hangouts here in Long Beach!
As I mentioned earlier, I’m making a real effort to engage with my local community. I think it is easy to be mesmerized by worldwide notoriety. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want recognition from afar but sharing my talent within my community has been so incredibly fulfilling and it’s real!
Here in Long Beach, I am discovering a growing support network for the arts and I’m just scratching the surface. The Arts Council for Long Beach and the Long Beach Post’s arts and culture section, the Hi-lo, are two go-to destinations when I’m looking to engage with my community.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
I’ve been exhibiting my art locally, most recently at Flatline gallery (https://www.flatlinegallery.com/) as part of ‘The Sketchbook Show’. I post a lot of my photography and some drawing on my blog that I started in 2008, zeegisbreathing.com. It’s funny to look back at the blog in this age of social media.
My design studio is open for business and I’m always excited to hear from anyone looking for creative work!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nick.studio/
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zeegisbreathing/
- Other: http://www.zeegisbreathing.com/
Image Credit:
Studio Portraits: Dylan Sido, Skateboard Photos: Girl Skateboards
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