Chris Nelson
Chris Nelson is a Richmond, VA-based artist and graduate of VCU’s School of the Arts. Inspired by classical art as well as more contemporary styles, his paintings hint at the fantastic and the surreal while remaining firmly anchored in realism. Human skulls are a recurring subject in his work, sometimes depicted alone in the frame or combined with other objects to create ironic liveliness and expression. His work serves as a contemplation not only on death in a literal sense, but on the modern death of the human spirit through technological advancement in the arts. As more creative space is swallowed up in the unrelenting conquest of the digital revolution, Nelson remains stubbornly fixed on working in the physical and manual, painting in oils and using classical themes and techniques to tell quiet stories in a loud world.
Artist Statement
We live in a time of exciting and dangerous dynamic change. The digital revolution is relentlessly overcoming much of our lives. Technology serves to supplant and eliminate our manual procedures and rituals. In the name of convenience, machines will make our coffee for us, print our sculptures, stretch our canvases, and mix our paint in the form of digital art, and ultimately, with the full onslaught of generative AI, will create our art for us. It is not just that this results in art that is overall of a lower quality and with less resonant emotional value; it also robs us of our rituals. Life is as much about enjoying a clean room as it is about the act of cleaning it.
I choose to make art with the intention of the creative act itself. As I paint, I suffer through the frustrations of trying to figure out the composition, being disappointed with my outcome, making mistakes, and trying again, until the moment when I reach something that is close to, but of course can never actually achieve, the vision in my head. A poverty it would be if I didn’t go through all of that. What I would miss out on.
We are a species of rituals, be they religious or secular, profound or mundane. We ritualize processes as dynamic and profound as the creation of a great work of art, or as ordinary as sweeping up the studio after it is done. Rituals are a requirement for our spirits, and the modern world seeks to rob us of our rituals in the name of comfort and convenience. I resist the current moment with my slow, deliberate, imperfect paintings. My art is nothing special or profound. It is nothing that a greater painter 200 years ago could not have done better, and for that matter it is certainly nothing that an algorithm could not whip up in seconds. But I will have been the one to make it, and I will have been alive the entire time I was doing so.
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