Nathan Wilson is ‘stoked’ at winning a finalist place in this year’s National Youth Art Awards.
Ngahinapouri’s Nathan Wilson could be pumped enough to make you think a parcel of long-held dreams had just landed in his lap.
The 22-year-old is elated to have been selected as a finalist in the 2023 National Youth Art Awards, an event hosted annually by the Waikato Society of Arts (WSA). One of his works, a sizeable abstract featuring slices and angles in shades of blue and grey, is now hanging in Hamilton’s Blue Gallery as part of the Youth Art Awards exhibition which opened on July 28 and runs to August 13.
“This was my first time entering, and to be up there with 50 of the best youth artists in the country … I am really stoked,” he said on Monday, days after the formal exhibition opening and awards night. “I wasn’t named a winner, but it’s pretty overwhelming just to be in it, particularly on my first crack.”
The 22-year-old has always had a thing for art. He lives at home with parents Lee and Pete Wilson and holds an early memory of his mum doing a painting on his nana’s balcony.
“I remember her showing me how to do things with cotton to make clouds on the canvas. That is probably my earliest memory of art.”
Nathan Wilson’s entry.
After finishing primary schooling in Ngahinapouri, Nathan went on to Hamilton Boy’s High School. He quickly pushed aside an early twinge of negativity about structured art classes but grew to love them and quickly started fanning the spark he so clearly harboured. After school, he completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Whitehall in Auckland, majoring in graphic design.
“I loved that graphic space, where things are much more aligned, more technical than they are in the creative area,” he said. “Whitehall was amazing. They allowed us to do both.”
Nathan said his work reflects his reality, captures the essence of his deepest thoughts. The process is for him a sanctuary, a place to alleviate stress and one where he finds beauty in the imperfections of his subjects, like marks, wrinkles and textures. He likes to experiment with replicating tiny things, like the delicacy of a grass blade or textured leather … there are no sweeping landscapes in his repertoire.
An early muse was American artist Jet Le Parti, a man who talks about quantum particles and reckons the world’s physicists informed his work. About a year ago, Nathan fell upon another American artist, Terry Urban, whose style is said to ‘clutter the canvas’.
Borrowing from these explorations and adding his own, Nathan is developing a unique style. When not working, either in graphic design or screen printing, he is painting frenetically at home, filling the space with big canvases, some of which are beginning to find their way into local exhibition spaces.
