Mike Nudelman
Beyond #2, ballpoint pen on paper, 5.5 x 4”, 2022
Matthew Shelley: You’re from Long Island right?
Mike Nudelman: Yeah, I grew up on Long Island in a town called Saint James. It’s about 45 minutes east of the city. Later, I went to college in upstate New York. I got a BFA in printmaking at Cornell University. I went straight from there and moved to Chicago and got an MFA in painting and drawing at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I stayed there for about 4 years after school so I lived in Chicago for about 6 years total. Then I moved back to NYC and lived in Brooklyn for about 5 years. After that I moved out here to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
MS: You said that you work in media?
MN: Yeah, I was a senior editor at Business Insider. I was working on all of the news graphics.
MS: How did you end up getting involved in that? Was that just based on skills that you picked up after school?
MN: Pretty much. I got lucky in having a real design career by the fact that I was a creative person living in Chicago in 2010 / 2011. That was a time when Groupon was just hiring every creative person in Chicago. So, I started working at Groupon doing design, and then that sort of spiraled into having a real job.
MS: How did you feel about living and working in New York City? How were your years in New York?
MN: For me, growing up in the New York suburbs, it felt inevitable. There was this gravitation pull to go there. In some ways, that’s why I resisted going to school in New York. It felt like, New York is where I’m going anyway, so let me try and have some time elsewhere before I end up there. Later, when I moved to New York, I totally took everything about living there for granted. I have about 6 years of perspective on the place after leaving. I go back to see friends and family often. I mean, you can’t really say much bad about it. It’s great.
But, my experience of it at the time that I lived there was that it was just very draining. It was a hard place to make artwork. Which might sound silly to some people. So many people who live there do make great artwork. Maybe it takes a certain personality? Anytime that I talk to people who don’t live in New York, and I express thoughts about why I wanted to leave, people are always expecting a more dramatic reason. It wasn’t anything dramatic. It was the little things. The process of doing even the simplest tasks, you know?
MS: Completely.
MN: It just adds up.
MS: Yeah, I can relate to that. You begin the day at 100%, and you’re spending a little energy on each task, by the time that you get to your studio work you might be drained to 30%. In New York, it seems like so much of your energy is spent just surviving that you don’t have much left over to focus on making artwork.
Living in the suburbs, I spend much less energy on the little things. By the time I get to my studio work, I’m still at like 60% energy. I just feel like I have a lot more head space out here. I want to put the energy into my work, and not put the energy into just trying to fight my way through the city. For me, it had a lot to do with the quiet. I grew up in Oregon, and I don’t think that I realized how difficult it would be for me to adjust to living in NYC. Once I had been there for a year or two, I realized the toll it was taking on me.
What was your studio set up like when you were there? It seems like you work at a pretty small scale?
See Through, ballpoint pen on paper, 11 x 8.5”, 2020
MN: Yeah for the past decade that’s definitely true. Back in 2009 to 2012, I made some larger drawings. The largest one that I made is probably 40” x 70”. That took a full year. But yeah, for the last 12 years most of my work has been a standard 9” x 12” or something around there.
MS: I’ve always had an attachment to small works. There’s a relatability that I feel with artists who focus on small works. I work on paper at pretty small sizes. Most everything that I make is around 22 x 30” or smaller. I’ve always liked the attributes of small works. I love to intimacy of the viewing experience. That only one person at a time can step up to view the work. There’s a modesty in small works that I appreciate. I don’t really think that small work sacrifices it’s impact either. I think it can be incredibly moving.
Was your studio set up in your home?
MN: It was most of the time. My wife and I rented a shared studio space in Bushwick for about a year. Sometimes I liked having a space outside of the house, but in the end, for pragmatic reasons working out of the house makes the most sense.
MS: I think around 2014 I decided that I wasn’t going to have an outside studio anymore. After that, it was far easier for me to get into a good work flow. I work late at night, and I didn’t want to commute home at 3 or 4am either. Keeping an outside studio just didn’t make sense at a certain point. I don’t work at a huge scale, or with toxic materials, so there is no reason that I can’t work at home.
MN: Exactly, after a while my studio’s biggest benefit was storage space.
MS: In these interviews I always ask people about their beginnings in visual art. How did you get involved in making artwork? Was it a lifelong thing for you, or was there a certain event that moved you into the arts?
MN: Both of my parents are accountants. Neither of them are artists, but they’re both very creative. They are both handy, and they make things. I was always making things when I was growing up. For a period, I thought I wanted to be an architect. Later, I wanted to be a car designer. Things like that. It wasn’t really until the end of high school that I realized that making art can be a career.
Even then, when I went to college I don’t think that I had plans of becoming an artist. I thought things would fall into place and I’d find some kind of career. The common thread has always been drawing. I have been doing that my whole life. I’ve always had this compulsion to draw and make things. Drawing was always central. Throughout it all, I thought drawing would be a means to an end, and then I realized that drawing was an end in itself.
MS: I think it’s cool that you mentioned that your parents were makers and had a DIY attitude. I was always encouraged as a kid to make things that I wanted. I guess that was part of growing up at a time when people were naturally a little more resourceful. There was a lot less to entertain everyone, so I spent a lot of time inventing projects as a kid. It was economical, but it was also a pass-time.
I think that to this day, even if I ever drifted out of the arts, that desire to make things will always be in me. I’m sure that will always be a part of whatever I do for a living. I keep a wood shop in the garage that is mostly for framing, but I do all kinds of other projects in there as well. Making things gives me a sense of purpose.
MN: Yeah that makes sense. I should also add that my parents were always supportive of my career path. They are still really supportive. That’s surprising considering that neither of them are artists by profession.
MS: You mentioned that you did your undergraduate work in printmaking.
And Yet…, ballpoint pen on paper, 11 x 8.5, 2020
MN: Yes
MS: What kind of printmaking did you focus on?
MN: I did mainly etching and engraving. Mostly intaglio processes. I don’t know if it’s still this way at Cornell, but at the time there were four majors that you could choose from. You had to pick one of the four. It was painting, printmaking, sculpture, or photography. I just wanted to make drawings. Between painting and printmaking, it seemed like printmaking gave me more of what I was looking for. I wasn’t that into the process of printmaking at the time, so it was more making etchings and doing some monotypes and that felt the most immediate. I really liked that. I took 2 or 3 lithography classes and could not wrap my head around the process at all. It was way too abstract. I really did not like it. It’s funny now because not only do I love lithographs, but I’ve been getting back into printmaking in the last year or so, and just doing lithography.
MS: Are you going to a co-op lab, or a residency program, or something like that?
MN: Last year I was able to do a residency at the Tamarind Institute. I did two lithographs there, which was the best experience. Not only are their facilities amazing, but everyone there was awesome and inspiring, and super helpful. It was my first introduction into collaborative printmaking where you work with professional printers.
MS: That’s where you work with a master printmaker to make a commercial ready edition right?
MN: Yeah. What I did there is called the PTP Program (Printer Training Program). They have a group every year of 4 or 5, I guess you could say students, but it could include anyone from undergraduates to working professionals. It’s a 2 year training program that they have, so every year you come in and work with the printers and make 2 editions. It’s a great experience as an artist and it’s cool for them to collaborate with artists.
It was a really nice way to get back into printmaking, but also focus more on the image and what I was doing with the subject. Having their influence and expertise, with them making suggestions on the fly was great. After that I started working with a printer here in Santa Fe and made a few other editions. I definitely plan on making more.
MS: Yeah, I loved seeing some affordable editions on your website. I really appreciate the way that editions make artwork more accessible. Personally, I want to be able to price things so that they are available to a wide audience. I would like my work to be available to other artists, and I’m always happy to trade with people, but I also wanted editions to be available so that the price of the artwork remains accessible. I am encouraged by the idea that you can get a piece of artwork for $100 - $300. If a person wants a print, that’s something that’s an amount of money that you can save up for. It’s a reasonable amount of money.
I think printmaking opens the door to a lot of exciting possibilities. I like how prints exist in multiples, and they’re not as attached to that old school idea of original artwork. It lowers the price point and lets in a whole new group of collectors.
MN: Yeah, I totally agree. You can go online and look around and buy a signed lithograph by well known artists for like $1,000. You can get a David Hockney lithograph for a few grand.
MS: I’ve never been receptive to the structure of art collecting. People seeking after these rarefied objects as status symbols, where the more expensive they are the better. That really disgusts me. I’d prefer to keep my prices low. I want people to have the work that I make.
Other artists, my peers, are the most important audience that I have. The validation of other artists is way more important to me than the validation of collectors. Editions make it possible for me to give work to other artists, and still keep a few pieces for my archive.
MN: Right.
Anything But a Giraffe, ballpoint pen on paper
MS: I did some printmaking as an undergraduate, and I felt like there were two types of printmakers. On the one hand, there were people who used the press as a tool, and embraced the unpredictable, chance based things that can happen with printmaking. On the other hand, there was another personality type that was very concerned with making perfect editions. They were on this calculated mission to get these identical sets of images.
I did lithography and screen printing, and I didn’t care at all about making identical sets of images. I loved what the press could do as a tool to make unique and unpredictable images. If each print was unique, I saw that as a good thing.
Was there a side of printmaking that you identified with as an undergraduate? Was it the press as an image making tool, or the press as a tool for reproductions that you connected with?
MN: When I was an undergraduate, it was 100% the accidental and experimental. Maybe that was a convenience because I wasn’t technically good enough to make a good edition? I don’t think I made an edition of more than 3, and I only did that a few times.
The relationship that I have to it now, and what I did at the Tamarind Institute, it’s a balance. In order for it to work, there has to be this certain photographic quality. The prints that I was making at Tamarind were 6 color, pretty complex images, that needed to be carefully engineered to have that photographic quality. I wanted it to be greater than the sum of it’s parts as a print, and take on this photorealistic feeling.
It was a balance, because my work is also about the glitch and the attempt at perfection. The pursuit of perfection in these drawings is unobtainable and impossible. The drawings are made with ballpoint pen. The pens gunk up and you end up with a simultaneously very perfect, but very flawed surface. Trying to mimic that in printmaking, but still have it reach a certain threshold of believability was interesting.
MS: Yeah, I appreciate film photography for the same reasons. Especially in the case of snapshots or novice photographers, there’s bound to be over exposure, damaged film, or light leeks. I like the way that your imagery seems to lean into that. You often work with sightings that would be captured with low budget, snapshot photography. Drawing can move right along the edge of perfection, but the way that it’s referencing low quality photography allows for these little glitches to be very believable.
MN: Yeah absolutely. The process of translation from photography, to drawing, to printmaking is a big part of my work. In many ways, I would position the work that I’m making now as drawings of photographs, whereas a decade ago, I was working on drawings of paintings.
When I took this process to printmaking there were other challenges. Adam and Emma were the two printmakers that I worked with at Tamarind. The first day we had really high hopes. We decided that we would deconstruct the drawings through printmaking, mimicking the ballpoint pen colors and stuff so they mix to match the ballpoint pen primary colors. I think there’s only 10 ballpoint pen colors out there, but by slowly layering them I can get a full color range. So, they mixed this cyan color, and a magenta color, and started stacking them just doing some test prints, and we realized that this approach wouldn’t work at all. In theory, it was a cool idea, but we’re going to have to mix some real colors and translate this more than we thought.
MS: I’m sorry to throw so many technical questions at you, but I’m very interested in what you did at Tamarind. How does your everyday artist, who maybe doesn’t have a background in printmaking, suddenly release an edition of prints? When you show up do they just push a lithography stone toward you and tell you that they’ll print whatever you draw, or is it different than that? Does the artist show up with a drawing and tell them, “this is what I have in mind, how to we turn this into a print?”
MN: It can depend a little bit on the personalities involved and what you’re going for. In my experience, the relationship started a couple of months before I showed up. We were talking through what I was thinking, and they were familiar with my work at that point, so they had some baseline questions. That got us started. We were not sure how much would be possible. It was open ended. Some people show up there with drawings ready to go. I didn’t do that, so there was a lot of trial and error. I don’t think I really slept for two weeks.
Actually the two prints that I made there, I didn’t use a stone at all. I did it all on acetate. So it was all photo transfers to plates. It was mostly drawing on a sheet of clear acetate with a wax pencil, and they were transferring it. It was a strange experience because my source imagery were these photos from this older book, and they were all litho printed. Then I’m doing these drawings of them, and trying to deconstruct them to make a drawn lithograph, but one that’s going through a photographic process.
MS: That’s mind-bending.
MN: It was really interesting and cool, but it was such a different way of thinking. Much different than when I’m making the drawings.
MS: I’m sure. Let me see if I’m following that correctly. The reference photos that you used were from an older book, back when book images were all litho printed. So the authors of this book wanted to use this snapshot photography of UFO sightings, and in order to print them in the book they have to be transferred to lithographs. Then you’re interpreting this image from the book, and turning it into a drawing, and then that drawing gets turned back into a lithograph. Is that right?
MN: Yeah.
MS: That reminds me a little of Vija Celmins and the way that she talks about her work. She’s one of my biggest influences. She’s probably been the most consistently important influence over the course of my whole development.
MN: Yeah, I think about her work a lot. I thought about her work while I was doing the project at Tamarind. The way she can transition from painting, to drawing, to printmaking. That’s something that I aspire to. I think for some people’s work, her’s especially, it makes sense in a practical way, but also in a conceptual way, which is really nice. As you approach her work, they’re all related, but they’re all very different objects.
MS: It’s one of the cool things about having a consist imagery. Then the imagery can remain stable, but you can shift media. Then there isn’t this question of what you’re going to depict, only the question of the materials and methods that you will use to depict it. It’s a great way to work, because as you shift materials it really recharges the work.
MN: Totally. When you’re working with similar imagery, it’s about the object. If I approach a Vija Celmins piece I’m not thinking, about the stars, or the waves of water, I’m thinking about the object that she’s made. I’ll look at the paper, or the surface of a painting, and take in the whole object.
Zipped, ballpoint pen on paper, 11 x 8.5”, 2020
MS: Definitely. Her retrospective at The Met was a big deal for me. I had seen her work in person before, but it was incredible to see it all in one place. The Ed Ruscha retrospective recently was the same way for me. Those are two artists that I can never get enough of.
What about your artistic influences? I’m always really interested in people’s influences. To me, it’s a great window into what an artist’s priorities are like, and how they think about art. Are there artists that you look at regularly whose work is really important to you?
MN: It’s funny. There’s a few core people, and the periphery is always changing. It’s not surprising that you’d bing up Vija Celmins because the relationship is clear. She’s a core person that I’m looking to all the time and I love her work.
Thomas Demand is another important influence for me. He’s constructing fictions that are a little, you know, slippery? I don’t know, his work, and a few other people, it’s like an interesting magic trick which I really like.
MS: I’m just looking at his work now. This is my kind of thing.
MN: Yeah, they are all constructed models that he then photographs in the studio.
MS: Wow.
MN: They’re beautiful photographs, but if you get up to them and start inspecting them, it immediately starts falling apart. You can tell that it’s construction paper and it becomes so clear. There’s another obvious relationship there to my work. I think about the space of the viewer as they start to approach the artwork. The relationship of the viewer to the artwork changes when they’re ten feet away as opposed to one foot away. As the viewer gets closer, the image starts to fall apart and it achieves a new layer of beauty. It’s not a value of better or worse, it’s just something different.
MS: Is there anybody else in the mix of core people?
MN: Yeah, not enough time has passed so that I can say if its in the core of my influence, but over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about Walter De Maria. My wife and I were lucky enough last year to go and see The Lightning Field. That was after about eight years of entering to lottery. It was probably the single best art experience that I’ve ever had.
MS: So do you stay overnight there?
MN: Yeah, you’re there for just under 24 hours. You stay overnight there. They put you with 8 people in this cabin and they drop you off and leave you there. There’s food in the cabin for lunch, dinner, and breakfast. You just spend the day how you want. We walked the perimeter, and then we walked in between. It was just such an immersive and overwhelming experience.
MS: Did you guys have any weather while you were there?
MN: No we didn’t see any lightning, which was fine for me. The lightning aspect of it almost seems like too big of a spectacle. I didn’t even know this book existed, but at Marfa Books I bought this book of essays by Rackstraw Downes. He has a short essay about The Lightning Field. At the end he says something like, the biggest flaw of it is the expectation of maybe seeing lightning.
MS: That makes sense. Do they have any stipulations on what you can do? Like do they let you wander the place at night? Do they just let you spend the time as you want?
MN: They just let you do your thing.
MS: I’ve always wanted to visit the Southwest. I’d like to go there for a lot of reasons, but The Lightning Field is something that I’d want to do there for sure.
MN: It’s great. I can’t say enough good things about it.
Extensions, Ballpoint Pen on Paper, 11 x 8.5", 2020
MS: So when you went to School of the Art Institute of Chicago, you did your MFA with a focus in drawing. Did you want to move away from printmaking?
MN: I don’t think I thought I would do much printmaking after college. Not having access to a press was part of that, but there were other reasons too. It’s hard to remember how this transition even happened, but my BFA show was eight digital animations that I had made. They were these frame by frame animations with like 500 digital drawings that I had made. By the end of undergraduate I was already moving onto something else. I only applied to painting / drawing programs for graduate school. I feel even now that conceptualizing my work within the history of painting is kind of more appropriate.
MS: I move around through a lot of different materials. My feeling is that it’s all 2D work, so I just refer to my methods as work on paper. Whether it’s photography, or printmaking, or drawing, it’s all kind of the same thing. Like you, drawing is the throughline of my portfolio. Drawing is something that never really goes away.
You use a pretty specific kind of imagery. Did you arrive at that slowly, or did you find that imagery quickly?
MN: Definitely slowly. All of the work that I’m doing now, the genesis of it was work that I started doing in 2008 or 2009. Those were drawings of paintings. That’s how I was describing and contextualizing them then. I would make drawings of these romantic and sublime, Hudson River School, type of imagery. I was making drawings of Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Cole paintings. I was making drawings of their paintings filtered through this very processed based type of drawing. The imagery started creeping away from those sources and I started bringing in some other imagery. I was sometimes combining 2 paintings into a single drawing. I did some where I was incorporating images from the Hubble Telescope and stuff like that.
Slowly the imagery started to get more straightforward in it’s absurdity. The first drawing that I did that had a flying saucer in it was about 2011, and I immediately disregarded it. I almost forgot about it, and six or seven years later I thought about it again and decided to go back to it.
MS: Yeah, I have had many experiences like that in the studio. When I was finishing my MFA I was doing these labor intensive drawings of these real quiet alpine landscapes. I was doing them all with very hard graphite, like a 6H pencil, and a lot of graphite powder. I worked on them very diligently. The imagery was almost incidental for me. It was more about the repetition of a certain kind of mark.
One night, I made a drawing of a NASA launch, and it seemed like there was this correlation to the mountain drawings. Maybe because drawings were of the natural world, and the NASA launch was a picture of people seeking to study the natural world? I’m not sure, but the felt related.
I saw a drawing of yours that is based on a photograph from an Apollo mission, of the Earth rising over the horizon of the Moon. I felt like I understood the impulse to draw something like that. I find that kind of imagery very appealing.
Behind and Ahead #2 (Ahead and Behind), Ballpoint Pen on Paper, 11″ x 14″, 2012
MN: I feel like both of us were probably responding to some innate feeling that there’s a relationship between these images. Pictures of landscapes and space exploration; you could say that they’re both very sublime images.
MS: Yeah, the Apollo missions were like a sublime experience felt by the whole planet. It might have been the last time that people simultaneously had that kind of feeling of respect and awe for our place in the universe.
MN: They’re also images of exploration. There was this essay that I read when I first started making those drawings with the space imagery. It was the first thing that I had read that helped me articulate the relationship between romantic landscape and space exploration. John D. Barrow wrote this essay 15 or so years ago, where he talked specifically about the relationship between images from the Hubble Telescope and Hudson River School paintings.
MS: Wow cool.
MN: He compares specific images from the telescope to certain paintings. He says that the similarities are not a coincidence. The similarities are because they are both images made by humans. Because the images from the Hubble Telescope do not come back as photographs. The images are based on data, and scientists interpret that data and a picture is made based on that data. He says that scientists incorporate their memory of Romantic landscape painting into the images without realizing it. That the qualities of Romantic landscape paintings exist in the collective subconscious, and that scientist can’t help but project that onto these images from the Hubble Telescope. Scientists choose how to orient the images, and they feel like landscapes. They have to select colors, and cropping, and so on.
MS: Yeah, I’ve always been confused about that. You know these images are not direct photographs. The images are built from data. So where does authorship enter the whole thing? How much of it is being created?
I see here in other parts of your portfolio, the Loch Ness Monster, Sasquatch, and other kinds of sightings. These pictures are similar to the romantic landscape, and exploration images, but there is more humor present. It cracks open this whole world of tabloid stuff. It seems like a pop culture interpretation of the sublime and the unknown. Would that be a way of interpreting that stuff?
MN: For sure. That was kind of the driving force at first. Over time I developed more of a nuanced relationship with these things. The way I think of it now is that they’re all fictitious. They are all invented imagery. That doesn’t make them less of anything. It makes them so much more layered and interesting to me. Invented in the same way that Albert Bierstadt’s paintings are invented. He made some preliminary sketches when he was traveling, but then he went back to his studio and made something that he thought was better. All of that imagery is invented in a way to tug at the viewer. I think that’s a theme that you can relate to a lot of space imagery, to the Loch Ness Monster, and to UFOs.
MS: Yeah, I get that completely. It reminds me of the artist Robert Cumming. I haven’t read extensively on his work, but what I have read about it, he was a person that was interested in illusion and reality in photography. He set up a lot of still life photos that pulled at the thread between reality and fiction. The way that photography is always thought of as a reliable tool to document things. It’s of course every bit as fallible as drawing, or painting, or anything else and can be manipulated in the same way.
I relate to your interest in fact and fiction and where the line is drawn between the two. I think that the more that we get involved in images, and think in images, as artists, it’s easy to get more enthusiastic about things that are fictitious than things that can be tied to reality. Ultimately, it’s all fiction, and none of it has a firm attachment to reality.
MN: I feel to some degree like my interest is beginning to wane in the UFO images as disclosure and other issues become more a part of the public discourse. I’m not interested in that part of it. I’m interested in the quality of those photos that were taken in the 1970s. It’s funny now, because you have these spontaneous interactions on instagram, and people send me these articles or books on UFOs, which is cool, but doesn’t really connect to my real interest.
MS: Like they think that you’re into conspiracy, or some kind of UFO enthusiast?
MN: Yeah. Totally. I find it entertaining, but that’s not where my intellectual investment is. I find that part of it less interesting.
MS: I’d imagine that UFO themes attracts a certain type of person.
MN: Browsing and collecting books is a huge part of my practice and how I get source imagery, but it’s also how I work through ideas and what I surround myself with in the studio. I doubt that I have read more than 300 words from the 150 UFO books that I have in the studio. I’m purely in it for the images.
Small Coincidence, Ballpoint Pen on Paper, 11 x 8.5", 2021
MS: If I started to read about it, it would actually take part of the mystery away. I’d want to flip through the books and wonder about who the hell these people are? Who took this snap shot, and who is the community of people behind them that are supporting the idea that it’s a UFO? Knowing too much about it can be a liability. There’s a point where it starts to become weighed down and no longer interesting.
If you work with a subject long enough, the things about it that initially attracted your attention start to dissipate because you’ve learned too much about it. You get overly familiar with something and the intrigue starts to disappear.
MN: For sure. Especially with this imagery it feels like a race to the bottom sometimes. Is it real? Of course it’s real; I’m looking at it. Any other kind of investigation seems beside the point.
MS: I often work with photography situations where the fact that it is staged is this huge part of what it is about. I’m not looking to conceal that. I only want it to be believable at a glance. Pictures are always equally real and fake at the same time.
Even if the UFO sightings was just a photographic anomaly, that’s every bit as interesting in terms of how it interacts with the public imagination and what we think about such pictures.
MN: There’s a photographer that shoots these awe inspiring landscapes, but he shoots them using dies and stuff in fish tanks. Kim Keever is his name. Those definitely reference Hudson River School paintings. They are these deeply illusionistic spaces, but when you see the prints you begin to realize that some of what is creating that illusion is condensation on the glass of the fish tank, so you get struck with the flatness of it. That’s an aspect of those that really speaks to me.
VOLUME: Thank you to Mike Nudelman for taking the time to speak about his work. To see more of Mike’s work visit his website here or his instagram account here.