Marc Nischan

Taking cues from Golden Age magazine illustrations, pulps and comics, 60s men’s mags and car culture iconography, I explore ideas of isolation, individualism, fortune and fate, power, beauty and belonging. Sometimes paintings are based on a commentary I’d like to make, or a story. More often, a painting starts from an idea or sketch that I think is interesting enough to develop. I add other characters from my sketchbook to it, or make up new elements to flesh out the composition and populate the paintings. Generally that means girls, cars, and monsters.

I see a correlation between art and music. Some of my favorite songs have been the ones that I have misunderstood the words to. I’ve been disappointed on more than one occasion when reading the “real” lyrics to a song. Similarly, I like my paintings to give off a sort of vibe without necessarily explaining everything to you, so I lay out the paintings in a surreal manner to keep the narrative intentionally vague. Following that example for my paintings, I make up a back-story for the characters in the sketches and use it to guide choices and elements. I feel that this makes the painting more interesting by giving the viewer something to contemplate as they make up their own relationships for the subjects in the piece.

I live in Oak Park, I’m a CCS alum, and a life-long musician. I spent 6 years on and off as the guitar player for Detroit’s perennial rock ‘n’ roll favorites, Twistin’ Tarantulas. More recently I fronted the garage-rock trio The Lincolns UK. I love traditional hot rods and Kustoms and spend way too much time working on my car, a full-custom 1950 Chevy Fleetline.

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