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Advertising Annual 2016
KADIR NELSON
always gave me plenty of paper.”
The summer he turned ten years old, his mother sent him to study with his uncle Michael Morris, an artist and art teacher. Morris recognized and encouraged his nephew’s talent. “He told my mother that I might be really serious about art,” Nelson remembers. “He gave me a really strong art foundation. We pretty much drew and painted all summer, and he taught me about perspective, lighting and color theory. When I went home, he sent me a huge box of art supplies—all the things we had used over the summer.
“I went back to study with him when I was sixteen, and during that summer, he taught me to paint with oils,” he relates. Around that time, Morris had learned a new way to paint with oils using glazes. “I painted in acrylic at the time, so I hated oils at first. I was only with my uncle for two weeks. We did two oil paintings; I went home thinking I’d never use oils.” But as soon as Nelson began painting with acrylic again, he decided he preferred oil paints after all.
Straight out of his degree program at Pratt Institute, he got a job at DreamWorks SKG. “I worked on the feature film Amistad for six months as a visual development artist, and
I loved every minute of it,” Nelson relates. “It was a chance to work on a film directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Debbie Allen, two people I’d looked up to for many years. A few other artists and I were charged with creating the look, feel and palette of the film with the intention of convincing Steven to direct the film. We created a ton of art that told the story through paintings. Debbie Allen and production designer Rick Carter assembled three large portfolios to present to Steven.”
Both his parents drew, but neither pursued the arts. “In college, my mother was discouraged from following that career path because it wasn’t very practical. Not many people knew you could make a living as an artist,” he says. “Instead, she became an engineer, but she always regretted not following her dreams. When she saw that I liked to draw as a little kid, she encouraged my gift. She
Amistad production designer Rick Carter recalls, “I wanted an illustrator who could bring a greater depth to the imagery I was looking for, to inspire the movie’s production design. It was not so much the details of the historically correct props; it was essentially a story that Goya, the painter, would have been able to tell with his imagery. Amistad’s bigger story is an enormous tragedy: the Middle Passage and what happened to so many people. That was what Kadir conveyed in his art—it had such elegance and refinement to it.”
The Middle Passage is the stage of the slave trade during which Africans were transported across the Atlantic to the West Indies in deplorable conditions. Spielberg hadn’t yet agreed to direct, hesitant because of the sensitive subject matter.
“Spielberg was very pleased with our work and signed on to direct,” Nelson says. “I did something similar for the animated feature Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. It was on these two films that I learned the art of collaboration. It takes hundreds of people to make a film. It was an important learning experience for me.”
“He created real art in the service of a cinematic effort,” Carter says on Nelson’s work for Amistad. “He paints these light, lean people who are so powerful and vibrant. Everything he does is heroic in the romantic sense, aspiring to a higher presentation of our existence. There is continuity to every- thing he does.”
When a commissioned project introduced Nelson to the Negro League baseball teams, their rich, sad history became a series of paintings that turned into the book We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball, which Nelson authored when none of the writers he wanted were available. The title netted him Coretta Scott King and Robert F. Sibert awards and paved the way for future titles, including Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans and a picture book biography of Nelson Mandela. All these projects have brought him to the attention of art directors across a spectrum
of businesses.
“Kadir Nelson stands out among the artists I work with: He’s more of a painter than most,” explains Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker. “Covers for The New Yorker are stand-alone works. There’s no cover line to tell you the topic. The image has to engage the reader. It’s hard to make paintings that work well on the cover—paintings tend to be more self-contained than drawings. Paintings have more authority at first glance, but that can make them less immediate.
Right: “The recording artist Drake gave me free reign for his Nothing Was the Same double album cover. After seeing my sketches, he had only one suggestion: combining two of them to make one image so that the young Drake would appear to be looking at an older version of himself and vice versa.” OVO Sound/ Young Money Entertainment/Cash Money Records/Republic Records, clients.
“This life-sized painting of Marvin Gaye captures the recording artist at his prime, just after the huge critical and commercial success of his career-defining album What’s Going On. Here, Marvin sits on a lush velvet sofa, contemplating lyrics for a new song.” Marvin’s Room Recording Studio, client.
© David Walter Banks