Interview with LA MusicBlog

Interview with Visual Artist R. Nelson Parrish
by: Kristin Houser

If you’ve been down Sunset Boulevard in the past two weeks, you’ve likely noticed a new addition to the Strip: 26 ten-foot tall fiberglass Les Paul guitar sculptures. As part of the GuitarTown public art project, over two dozen local and nationally acclaimed visual artists created pieces celebrating musicians, personalities, and influential moments unique to The Sunset Strip’s history and Gibson Guitar. The project will be on display for the next six months, after which the guitars will be sold at a Gala Auction with all proceeds benefitting nonprofit organizations and charities.

Local artist R. Nelson Parrish was one of the creative minds selected to create a piece for GuitarTown, and the result of his work is currently residing above The Roxy. LA Music Blog recently talked to him about how he got involved with the project, what inspired his guitar, and the “pretty damn cool” compliment that made his day.

R. Nelson Parrish

You’re originally from Alaska, but now make your home here in Southern California. How do you feel that the two different environments have influenced your work?

Well, that’s a pretty long answer actually. [LAUGHS] My work deals not only with color and motion in the contemporary landscape, but ultimately it focuses around the question of natural or nature versus the man-made or the synthetic. Where I grew up, and actually where my parents currently live, we’re 30 miles above North America’s farthest northern stoplight, so in terms of being on the fringe of civilization, or what most people would consider it, we’re definitely there.

Growing up in Alaska, the barriers between man and nature were very thin, and on top of that, you also had vast amounts of land in which you could actually study color. We have sunsets that last three to four to five hours in the summertime. Winter, because there is not a whole lot of light pollution, you actually can have your shadow cast by the moon out in the snow. On top of that, it doesn’t get black like it does in other places because your pupils simply just don’t dilate the same way.

Being there and then living in Southern California, particularly going in and out of LA where there is a lot of concrete, there is this hustle and bustle. At the same time, you have similar barriers, particularly when you go surfing. You drive Highway 1, the difference between you and the ocean and the wild dolphins and the surfers and the oil platforms that are out there on the coast, there’s a little bit more of a mixing. The lines between nature and man are blurred. On top of that, California in the history of art is notorious, and there’s an entire movement of people who study the light in Southern California. I think, if anything, there are far more similarities, just different nuances between the two places.

#35 (Cruisin: Sunset Strip)

You say you approach your art through the lens of what is natural versus what is man-made. Can you elaborate on how that’s incorporated into your work?

I entered grad school wanting to study the semiotics of color, which is basically the language of color. The way that I look at color, I really do think that it is its own medium, but I kept bumping into this question or this problem where I could never remove color from a discipline. Painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media—there was always that road bump, to a certain degree.

I used to be a ski racer. Had high hopes of being a professional ski racer. I picked up surfing when I lived in Australia for a little bit. Love auto racing. Just love cars, love everything about ‘em, so there’s this whole idea of moving fast and being in these situations of high speeds that are actually very natural to me. That feeling is the same association that I have when I’m working with color. With that, I really started questioning this idea of, “Okay, this is natural to me, and yet doing these extreme sports or being in these extreme situations is very unnatural to other people.”

From that it created a domino of questioning, “Okay, why is it unnatural to people?” and then on top of that, “What else is considered natural? What do I think is unnatural? Or what is natural, what is considered unnatural?” In Alaska, I grew up in a small town, literally, kind of like Northern Exposure. We would have moose bed down in the back of our yard. I grew up in downtown Fairbanks where half a block down was the court office and just another half a block was the police station, where we had an on-foot police chase through our yard. We had a shooting in front of our house. [LAUGHS] There’s definitely a disconnect between those situations and the moose in our yard. Basically taking personal experiences and then saying, “Okay, what is it? What does it mean to be natural or nature? What does it mean to be man-made?” Just by definition, the fact that man makes the definition of something, it is essentially man-made, so it kind of gets a little abstract and spins out of control.

Even something as simple as the national parks that we have here in the United States, which are just a gem. They’re something that really makes America, America. No where else in the world were there really, up until the point of national parks, were there natural preserves, but even those are a man-made construction. At some point when you’re driving into a national park, there is a line that says, “This is nature and this is not,” and I think it’s really arbitrary, but in people’s minds, there is a distinct definition. I think we’re constantly switching back and forth between those.

My work is somewhat of a picture or a portrait of that question. It is this lens that is grafted onto our current landscape. Now you have the ability to tweet from the top of Mount Everest or go on these amazing journeys and tell everybody about it on your blog, and everybody seems okay with that, but going over 70 miles an hour freaks people out or going into the water to go surfing or swimming scares people. Yet driving on the 405 in traffic, you look one way and the distance between you and another person is maybe eight feet, and they’re on their cell phone, painting their toe nails, eating a burrito and that distance is so small. Oftentimes that barrier is very, very limited. It begs the question, “Okay, what does that mean?” If anything, the lens is looking at the big picture and simultaneously looking at the small details.

#35 in progess, Photo by Jonas Jungblut

So it’s more of a view of saying like, “Where is that dividing point?” and at some point there isn’t that dividing point?

Right. I think that it mixes together, but there is something that ultimately divides the two. The way that I describe my work is a combination of wood, organics, resin, and racing stripes. I consider my stripes racing stripes. They are fast. They pull from the history of automobiles. These stripes and the combinations of stripes, and the way that they’re set up, if you really think about it, the stripes themselves are in their most natural state. Even though they’re a man-made construction, that’s the way that they’re supposed to be. Crisp, clean, linear, and direct. Because I do use wood in my work, people read that as nature or something natural even though the wood is so processed in comparison to where it actually began. You chop down a tree, you mill it, you glue it onto something. It’s bent, it’s cut, it’s fabricated, so if anything it’s ironic that the two signifiers how people read things are actually totally reversed.

You were one of 26 artists that were chosen for the guitar town on Sunset Strip. How did you get involved with that whole project?

You know, I consider myself really lucky. I’m a member of the Los Angeles Art Association, and they’re a non-profit that helps out artists. They’re really community based, and they are constantly keeping artists abreast of opportunities. They forwarded me the call for entries. It was a national call for entries. About six months prior, I did a photo essay and part of the essay required that I drive from Marfa, Texas to Lexington, Kentucky. I had to drive for 26 hours straight in order to make a deadline. To keep myself preoccupied and awake I actually started making long exposure photographs while hauling ass across the country. I started trying to make compositions or similar compositions using the existing light from the landscape, trying to make racing stripe compositions while driving.

I didn’t quite know what I was going do with them, but there was this correlation to my work. It was possibly the next step of evolution in my process, and when this opportunity came up for the GuitarTown, it all clicked together. In my proposal I said, “There is a rich cultural history of the Sunset Strip musically, but part of the Sunset Strip is this amazing American past time, which is cruising the Strip. Literally driving through Sunset and getting that experience, the sounds, the lights. It is iconic.” So I said, “You know what? I’m gonna take this process and try to recreate that, try to project that experience and reference that rich history.” On top of that, part of my works are totems. I create what are essentially contemporary totem poles. So I said, “I’ll make a 10 foot totem-esque Gibson guitar that references the narrative of cruising the Sunset Strip.”

Sunset Strip motion studies

So those photos are kind of the inspiration behind this guitar?

Absolutely. That was my proposal. I said that these photographs will determine the palette of the piece. What I did in order to sketch them was I actually took the photographs and took sections out of them. The result is what the Strip looks like through this lens. As I worked in my studio, I had several of the photographs actually printed up on my back wall so I could constantly reference them back and forth.

Were they just photos of the Strip, or were they photos that you had taken across country as well?

Just photos of the Strip. I spent two nights driving, and I shot about 1,000 images. I just went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until I felt I had enough material. Then I looked through all of them for a couple days, and then printed up about 100, about the 10 percent that I thought really captured the experience, and started from there.

You mentioned that it’s a 10-foot Gibson guitar. What was the process of actually building a piece that large?

Usually I build everything from the ground up, and this is the first time that I hadn’t. On top of that, it’s the first time I’ve ever used a literal shape. Most of my stuff is either squares or elongated rectangles, and I usually have wood shipped down from Alaska and start from there. This time the guitar was given to me by Gibson and the Sunset Strip Business Association, and it was the shape of a Les Paul in fiberglass. I believe it was made in Wisconsin, by FastCorp, which was both good and bad because I spend a lot of time fabricating everything, so my timeline, I didn’t have to deal with that.

However, the mold itself or the guitar itself was made out of resin, and there’s two types of resins. One’s epoxy, and the other one’s polyester. This one is made out of epoxy, and there was no way to test for that. Polyester resin doesn’t bond to epoxy resin, which I use. I use polyester resins in all my works, so after about 10 days, the work actually started to crack, peel, and come off. I had to sand everything off and start all over, which was frightening, to say the least, considering there was only a three-week deadline and it was the largest piece, to date, I had attempted. [LAUGHS]

So I was hustling. It was really intense. I found a solution, this priming coat called Vinyl Ester that would bond to the epoxy, cure, and then I could put the polyester on top of that. It worked, but there was about a three-day period where I had no idea what I was going do. I didn’t even know if I was going be able to turn in the guitar, because you can’t properly tint epoxy resins. In order to get the colors that I needed, I didn’t know how to achieve that. It was nuts. The whole time I was working 16 to 20 hour days solid up until the moment I delivered that guitar. [LAUGHS] It was intense, but at the same time, I couldn’t have been happier.

Laying down color, photo by Jonas Jungblut

Photo by: Jonas Jungblut

What were your thoughts when you found out that your guitar was gonna be placed on the Roxy?

You know, I didn’t know until I saw it, so I was a bit floored. It’s just a real honor to be a part of the Roxy, and then to find out that Nic Adler, the owner of the Roxy, personally chose the piece. I got to talk to him for a few minutes at the press conference for the public unveiling, and he couldn’t have been more excited. That means a lot to me. He basically said, “The Sunset Strip experience, I get it, I see it, you nailed it.” To get that immediate level of resonance in your audience means so much to me. That’s why I’m an artist, to inspire people and to get people excited about their surroundings, and to make connections with people. I was floored.

More important, my folks are retired now, and as I was driving from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles for the unveiling, my father called me. I guess he had found images on a blog somewhere of the guitar on top of the Roxy already. An artist is always concerned on how the work will be received. It is either triumph or disaster. I asked sheepishly, “Well, Dad, how does it look?” and my dad is a man of very few words. He is old school. He certainly doesn’t give a whole lot of compliments, and he said, “Pretty damn cool.” [LAUGHS] It was a good day, you know? [LAUGHS]

I haven’t been able to talk to a whole lot of people about it, but I really think that it is resonating with people. The response on Facebook has been tremendous. More importantly, the whole idea of natural settings, when you put that guitar up there, it looks like it belongs. It looks like it should be up there, and it blends in with the environment. This whole idea of creating or recreating or relooking at the landscape, and in this case the landscape of the Sunset Strip, it’s almost seamless. That’s what I’m trying to do with the work. It is supposed to be reflective of that environment in which it comes from. This is the first time that I’ve ever made a piece about a specific place. Then to have it on top of the Roxy and really complete that story or the narrative, I think it is phenomenal.

I’ve been back a couple times, and because the work is about color about light, if you look at the guitar at different times during the day, it changes. It mirrors the light in the Sunset Strip. Nic Adler said that he’s gonna have an electrician put in some up lighting so people can see it at night. The lighting is not in yet, but I can’t wait. It’s going to look amazing. To have him to go that extra mile means so much. It means that he really connected with the work. I had some friends that were at the Roxy for work, and they reported that Nic was like a kid at Christmas showing off his new toy. He couldn’t have been more excited about it. To me, that’s great. It makes it worth everything that I put into it and all the sleepless nights. If he’s excited about the work, that means that there are other people out there that are excited as well. That’s why I’m an artist. That’s a job well done.