Visual Artist Nicolas Craig named “Montreals Most Intriguing Artist” by Goodson Gallery — His Story & Work
Identity and Life Course:
Nicolas Craig, Canadian artist born in 1990, originally from Montreal (Canada) and graduated from UQAM in Visual Art.
“There is a guideline to each painting: to highlight the beauty of the human being and its quirks.”
With a skillful way of playing with human forms, bodies can be liquefied or stretched. However, there is always a meaning behind this distortion: a positive feeling underlined.
Craig’s art goes beyond bodies. Behind each work, there is a research on the human and its functioning. They appear as symbols such as flowers, butterflies, or pop culture icons.
The artist loves contrast, each painting is a reflection on life and its two sides. The duality is striking but still remains in the painting, embodying the absurdity of life.
Nicolas Craig began with the practice of graffiti during his adolescence, driven by the love of danger and self-transcendence that he had acquired in the practice of several extreme sports. At 30, he calmed down and fell into the world of more traditional arts, a passion he developed by studying many artists of his time such as Takashi Murakami, Andy Warhol and Banksy.
At the beginning of Nicolas Craig’s career, his primary intentions were not to sell and exhibit in galleries, but to be able to practice his art while working on the side, something particularly considered marginal with regard to the normatively of the Quebec society. He quickly took a professional trajectory, rather different from those for which his social anchoring intended him. One thing leading to another, he was able to make his place.
In graffiti, he is a character who attaches himself to his favorite series, then afterwards, it is in painting that he gets rid of the shackles of the world of graffiti. We can say that there is a real transition, which took place little by little to finally find its own artistic signature.
His aspirations seem to revolve around the Pop-Art movement and women. At the start of his career, he challenged himself to succeed in creating a reflection around the intersection between these two worlds. Then, his interest in colors quickly upset the rest of his aspirations.
By acquiring experience and better self-knowledge, the artist has built up a base, through which he experiments with different ways of creating, which has enabled him to invent cycles of renewal for his phases of creation. That is to say that his days are divided into two stages, like two ways of using the functions of his brain: when he is tired of one part, he moves on to the other. He thus builds different works simultaneously and balances between his lyrical style and his printmaking style. The white page syndrome is not part of his creative daily life. On the other hand, he needs to be alone in his studio to free himself. Quite introverted and shy, we could associate him with Vincent Van Gogh in his personality, except that he still has two ears left.
Original Works by Nicolas:
