Personal Growth: the Art of Nathan Reidt
On paper, Nathan Reidt’s creatures sometimes reveal themselves through a fog of graphite. He may begin with a “vague, circle-y shape” and shade areas. “Then I just stare at it for a long time and wait for something to pop out and refine that a little and stare at it.” The Philadelphia-based artist explains by phone from his home studio, “those take a lot longer because I’m waiting for them to emerge on their own.”
When they appear, it may be with faces that droop and wrinkle into thick, fleshy folds. They might sprout multiple heads or appendages or stare at onlookers through more than one pair of eyes. They could be covered in small bumps or bulbous masses. Or perhaps it appears as if innards are seeping from their bodies. Some look as if they were once beings we would recognize and still more manifest like nothing we intuitively know from the real world.
In the past two years, Reidt’s reputation as a fine artist has risen with spots in group shows at galleries like Arch Enemy in Philadelphia, Last Rites in New York and La Luz de Jesus in Los Angeles, as well as a 2018 solo exhibition at The Convent Philly. In that time, he has also developed a menagerie of fantastic beings that can unnerve and fascinate on sight. When he talks about influences, Reidt flashes back to the wildly creative creature designs of late 1970s and early 1980s film. Born in 1976, he is just the right age to have to have ingested those movies as a child: E.T., The Secret of NIMH, The Dark Crystal. Return of the Jedi was a favorite, he says, mostly for the monsters.
“There are some really repulsive monsters in Return of the Jedi,” he says excitedly. The Rancor monster, tall and so horribly slouched that the head appears to protrude from the chest, is one that Reidt declares is “disgusting.” But, there are more.
He continues, “Jabba the Hut is disgusting. The Sarlacc Pit is disgusting.”
At around the same time that he was watching these films, six-year-old Reidt stumbled upon a nest with hairless baby mice cuddled together, their eyes closed, forming a mass inside his family’s garage. Totally gross! And, yet, as much as that sight disturbed the young Reidt, that newborn mouse shade of pink stuck with him. It informs his use of color—when he uses it—today.
Look inside a dog’s mouth. It’s gross. There are weird lumpy little flabby things hanging around in their mouth, but it’s beautiful at the same time.”
“With everything that I do, I’m intrigued by that concept of repulsion and beauty at the same time,” he says. “This is a living creature. It is beautiful. Slugs are beautiful.”
He adds, “Look inside a dog’s mouth. It’s gross. There are weird lumpy little flabby things hanging around in their mouth, but it’s beautiful at the same time.” Reidt uses a lot of nature references in creating his monsters, like strange crustaceans or “birds with flabby necks.”
Film monsters made such a big impact on Reidt that he spent years working as a CG artist. He moved up and down the West Coast—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Spokane, Portland—while taking on jobs in video games, film, and television. “It was fun, but it was so stressful,” he says. He didn’t have much spare time, so he drew at his desk here and there and tried to get artists together to draw during lunch breaks. “I need to keep making art for myself, even if I’m working professionally doing it.”
Reidt notes that he had a tendency to make “weird stuff” on the job. “Whenever I would try to design something, it would come out very strange and it would always be too weird for the director or the art director or whoever was managing the project and I would have to tone it down, make it a little more normal, make it a little more mainstream.” Reidt suspects this resulted in his organic approach to making monsters today. “I think that’s partly why I let everything do it’s own thing, even if it looks really stupid,” he says. “I don’t try to conform it to make it look cool.”
After leaving entertainment, Reidt taught himself how to paint and says that he was “painting from life.” Eventually, though, his interest in fantasy worlds resurfaced. “I almost repressed it for a while because I was doing creature stuff for the film industry,” says Reidt. “So, taking a break from that meant taking a break from that whole end of the spectrum as well.” He has been gradually incorporating computer technology into his personal art too: “Just putting my toe back into the water,” he says. “It might be cool if I sculpted something on the computer and used it as reference for a painting. There’s definitely room to evolve and get back into that in the future.”
About two years ago, Reidt moved to Philadelphia after a stint in Detroit and it was there that his fine art career grew. He ended up connecting with people at The Convent Philly and in that art space met likeminded artists. He showed work at Arch Enemy in Philadelphia and Last Rites in New York.
Reidt says that the process varies a bit from image to image. Sometimes, he does have “a rough idea” of what he wants to draw. That was the case for the Semiotics show at La Luz de Jesus gallery in Los Angeles, which ran in early summer of 2019. Reidt was one of four participating artists in the show and contributed nine pieces. Amongst this body of work: a nude, human-like “Queen” with blank eyes and multiple breasts; “The Host,” a mouse with tendrils growing out its mouth and intestine-shaped coils emerging from its middle; “The Twins,” skinny, gruesome cats that appear to be fused together at the hip; “Soothsayer,” a ghostly figure with multiple arms who is posed like a religious icon.
With everything that I do, I’m intrigued by that concept of repulsion and beauty at the same time,” he says. “This is a living creature. It is beautiful. Slugs are beautiful.”
“I had been thinking about them in the back of my head for a few months while I was working on other deadlines,” he says. He had an idea of what he was going to draw before he set to work on them. “I started all nine pieces at the exact same time. I mount the paper on the board and I do a really loose outline and then lay them all next to each other and I go from there, slowly refining over and over.”
There is a sculptural aspect to his drawings. “I tend to think very sculpturally,” he explains. “This is the form that I want this to take; now I need to shade it and make it look dimensional and figure out how the forms interact in three dimensions with each other.”
Sometimes he makes actual sculptures as well, although, admittedly, this happens less often than he would like. “It feels very natural to me and every time I do it, I’m like, ‘This is amazing. This feels amazing. I literally only want to do this for the rest of my life,’” he says. “Somehow, I stop. I have a deadline or something. I stop doing it and I never get back to it for another year.” He says that he would like sculpture to be a regular part of his practice, bringing figures similar to his drawings into three-dimensional realm.
My stuff gets creepy. It’s kind of strangely cute sometimes, which isn’t really intentional,” he says. “It’s just that what comes out of me.”
Reidt paints as well, but says that this comes out of a different process that he’s trying to modify so that it is closer to how he works with graphite. “I’ve been wrestling with that, trying to figure out a new method of painting that’s similar to drawing, that allows me to explore forms and pull shapes out and get colors where I want them and richen them up where I want to richen them up,” he says. “I started glazing and using quick-drying mediums for doing more layering and glazing so that I can haze stuff out like graphite and push and pull a little, more like graphite. It seems to be working pretty well so far, so I’m going to keep going with that, just let it evolve, I guess, see where it goes.”
At the time of this interview, he had four pieces in the Dark Art 2019 group show at Beinart in Australia that coincided with Chet Zar’s solo show, The Administrators, at the gallery.
He says that he doesn’t necessarily see his work as dark art. “I enjoy the dark art scene. I like creepy art, but I don’t necessarily consider myself a dark artist,” he says. “Some other people might feel differently. I don’t have a problem with that at all.”
There’s a bit of a dichotomy in Reidt’s art. Yeah, he is attracted to the surreal and the grotesque, and he says he likes “awkwardness,” but he’s not trying to freak out the viewer. “My stuff gets creepy. It’s kind of strangely cute sometimes, which isn’t really intentional,” he says. “It’s just that what comes out of me.”*
This article first appeared in Hi-fructose Issue 53,, which is sold out. Get our latest issue in print when you subscribe to Hi-Fructose here.
Philadelphia artist Nathan Reidt crafts scenes in which everyday objects and beings garner growths and mutations. His drawings, in particular, carry a particular eeriness in their starkness, the artist’s abilities with light adding depth to each creation.
Nathan Reidt
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