Eric Nash’s Desert Noir Darkness on the Edge of Town
by Sandra Schulman
March 25, 2010

What is most striking about Eric Nash’s paintings are how they feel like film stills from a classic noir film. Signs from a car window, glimpses of secret lives behind closed doors, birds on barbed wire.

Nash works in traditional mediums as a figurative painter. He feels that charcoal, pastel and oil are timeless and simple and, therefore, completely appropriate for and at total odds with our complex digital world. To this point, he uses digital photography, found imagery and computer manipulation as a base and bridge between the real world and his art. He works in series and executes his final pieces in a traditional hand-rendered manner.

His collective work represents an ongoing interconnected story of America and its mundane, surprising and always beautiful modern visual experience. This story uses Southern California as a relevant starting point. In the American West, our last “new” and the ultimate destination, Los Angeles is a Rome and Las Vegas a Pompeii with the desert’s unreal reality in between. These cities live in the present and by the car. They create and destroy American dreams. They represent American ideals and pop culture in a distinctly individualistic Western way. In this atmosphere, Nash’s story is unfolded in glimpses – flickering moments, moods, signs, words and icons. It is held together with images from the American Road – symbol of freedom and a lifetime obsession for the artist.

“I am very happy to make the desert my studio and home,” says Nash. “Most of my collectors are from LA and Orange County and other areas, but recently I’ve been trying to introduce myself more locally. I think the art scene here in the high and low deserts has a great and growing future that I look forward to being part of.

For the ten years I’ve been here I’ve seen a lot of positive change. I’m hoping that just like with film, architecture and other things that we’re known for that art too becomes a reason to come to the desert. I’m also hoping that more young and mid-career artists come here due to it’s close proximity to LA and beautiful and inspirational environment. Essentially I moved here because of Joshua Tree and the mid-century architecture...a great combo of the beauty.”

Represented by:
Mark Rose, Artist Representative, Los Angeles, 310-497-1875 mark@roseinvenice.com
Galleries: Palm Springs - Red Dot Gallery, 760-880-0265 patrick@reddotgallery.com