Artist’s notebook: Nate Ethier

On the occasion of “Heavy Light,” Nate Ethier’s second solo show at David Richard Gallery, Two Coats of Paint invited him to share ten ideas and influences that inform his complex, pulsating abstractions. He is keenly interested in kinetic motion, precision, and repetition, and credits Agnes Martin for the sense of happiness and innocence that suffuses his paintings. Most importantly, he reveals a penchant for close looking: “You can learn a great deal about light and color from a slow walk in the woods.” The show includes twelve stunning paintings and is on view through June 27. –Sharon Butler

1. This image was taken in November 2015, on an early evening walk in Rome. I often think about the murmuration of birds, and I stop whatever I’m doing to observe it whenever possible. Thousands of birds moving in fluid, kinetic motion; inventing and reinventing form literally on the fly. It’s just beautiful. I draw a lot of inspiration from this phenomenon when I’m deciding where to place shapes in my own work.

2. I gained a very early appreciation of work, craft, materials, and tools from my parents. My father has worked as a carpenter for most of his adult life, and my mother works as a hairdresser to this day. I’ve included pictures of both of their hands, wielding the tools of their respective trades. I remember thinking a lot about timing and emphasis as I listened to my father’s hammering. It was like a metronome: one soft tap to start the nail, then two loud successive bangs to finish the drive. This would happen all day as I worked with him; it was practically mechanical. This staccato rhythm stuck with me, and I think it helped plant my interest in precision and repetition. I also remember the many trips to the various salons where my mother worked, and, ultimately, the one she owned herself. In those places, I would get a strong sense of workspace and materials. There were so many curlers, sinks, chairs, chemicals, etc., and they all seemed to serve a specific purpose. In a way, it was my first exposure to a studio-like environment. As with any salon, the focus was clearly on aesthetics, and this point was not lost on me, either. I learned the value of long-form making, and how to think in layers, from both of my parents.

3. Agnes Martin is a painter who I continuously return to as a source of inspiration – not only for her work, which I find impossibly beautiful, but also for her attitude and philosophy. She was so gloriously unapologetic in her efforts to paint “about” happiness, innocence, and beauty. I learned a great deal about the importance of quieting my mind in the studio from reading and listening to everything Agnes had to say. 

4. I get tremendous visual satisfaction in observing the dappling effect of light passing through swaying leaves, branches, and forest canopies. There is a wonderful softness to it. I could watch the marriage between the insistency of light and the dance and shadow-play of the foliage all day. I draw on this effect when considering my own compositions and palette choices. I think a lot about the air between the break in the projected sunlight and what is breaking it, and how I would like to paint that space. The idea of light moving through a grid is the formal underpinning for much of what I paint.

5. I’m interested in stages and stage presence. Music venues are an endless source of inspiration, the more historically significant the better. A valuable and very real transference of energy can occur between a musician/band and their audience that can be experienced only at a live show. Spaces like Carnegie Hall, the Bowery Ballroom, Town Hall, Webster Hall, and on and on, are like cathedrals to me. The structure of the stage itself stays the same, and each performer brings something entirely different to it. This makes me think of the relationship of the substrate to whatever is being painted on it. Recently, I witnessed perhaps the most profound live music event of my life. In July 2023, at the Newport Folk Festival, Joni Mitchell took the stage and performed her first full set of music in two decades. She did so after recovering from a brain aneurism that was presumed to be career-ending. The beauty and bravery in the air was so thick that I am convinced the fog that formed around Fort Adams during the show was made of that very stuff. I haven’t missed a Newport festival in 15 years. It is always a rich source of energy, and I bring it back to the studio.

6. Botanical order astounds me. A particular source of fascination is the efficiency with which the components of a flower are organized. Flowers are like slow motion fireworks, and I’m here for the show.

7. I find hiking to be a fine outlet for close looking. I will tout the importance of close looking to any artist, anywhere. You must have an awareness of terrain to walk up a mountain safely. With elevation, your sense of scale expands, and simultaneously you must be aware of shifting surfaces underfoot. A particular kind of slowing down happens for me on a hike, and I find it an indispensable resource in the studio. You can learn a great deal about light and color from a slow walk in the woods.

8. The Moon has captivated me my whole life. This colossal object orbits our planet and reflects the light of the sun. On a nightly basis, it offers different shapes of light, dependent on how the Earth casts its shadow. What can I say? The cosmic dance really does it for me. 

9. Conceived as a maquette for a stained-glass mural, Henri Matisse’s Les abeilles – that is, bees – satisfies on many fronts. I love the repetition of simple rectilinear shapes, the strong sense of arcing motion, the consistent and rhythmic divisions of the panels, the brilliant use of black and white, and, most of all, the graphic immediacy – an important concept for me.

10. The ocean is a lifelong and limitless source of inspiration for me. Leonard Cohen once said: “If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.” To me, that seems like another way of saying trust the process, which is something I’ve constantly reminded myself to do my entire career.

11. Finally, there’s Robert Bennett’s Sun Angles For Design. This book deals with the “understanding of the daily and seasonal changes in the sun’s position, as defined by the angles it forms with respect to the Earth’s surface.” I appreciate this text conceptually, and as a resource for designers and architects. I also just love the charts themselves owing to their formal value. Their grids are generally symmetrically bisected by the curvilinear mappings of the Sun’s angles based on the months of the year, in any given part of the globe. The fluidity and openness of the curves superimposed on the rigid structure of the grid, the soft edge coexisting with the hard edge, is a compositional strategy I continually celebrate.

“Nate Ethier: Heavy Light,” David Richard Gallery, 508 West 26th Street, Suite 9E, New York, NY. Through Jun 27, 2024