We were lucky to catch up with Nate Zoba recently and have shared our conversation below.

Nate, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

In former profession unrelated to my creative work, I was a risk management consultant. My answer to this question is not about a specific situation in which I took a risk but more generally about risk and creative work. Risk can operate as a collaborator and expand what we know. When we talk about knowledge, we typically speak of known knowns, unknown unknowns. There are also, made famous by Rumsfeld, known unknowns. The lesser known corollary of this is unknown knowns, things we know that don’t realize we know. Taking risks helps us understand what we know but don’t know we know. Risk activates intuitive energy, an energy that is sensed but not clearly defined or articulated. Through engaging with risk in regular and thoughtful ways, we are better able to decipher and understand and utilize that intuitive energy. The better we understand the knowledge we already possess, the better we well be at assessing the risk in situations and making decisions related to that risk.

Nate, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am an artist who primarily makes visual work, mostly paintings. I worked extensively in literary arts for a long time before making visual work. I occasionally still work in and with language. My painting is void of symbol and representation and instead engages with the aesthetics of color fields, pseudo-pattern, gesture, and action. I don’t use symbol or representation so that viewers are less likely to bring specific thoughts about things or objects to the work upon initially viewing it. Instead, I hope the work resonates with proto-linguistic, pre-symbolic notions, ideas without language containers around them – so that we might understand something we already know but has been previously perceived as unknown.

I hope for my work to help viewers ask questions re-think what problems are or might be by changing how the viewer sees. I hope that by asking questions about and from the work, the viewer can then bring these questions or that inquisitiveness to other parts of her or his life and help them to ask different questions. We often expend a lot time and energy trying to “solve” or “fix” a specific thing that we believe to be a hindrance. What I hope my work does is lead to better and broader questions of which a specific problem is only one part. Once we start asking better questions, we often realize the things we thought were the problems and solutions are not those things at all. Our perspective changes and the way and what we see changes. What we once thought of as a destination or solution is really a better vantage point but not an end point. I am interested in helping people get to the feeling of something being on the “tip of the tongue”, that feeling where you know you know something, but you don’t have the language for it and to embrace that way of being.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I aim to perceive both the world and my self, not look away, and observe the ideas and questions that come from looking, follow those ideas and questions to the aesthetic ideas and questions they lead to, and so on. When we observe things, ideas, feelings, relentless, the way we see them changes and what we see in them changes. My work is about asking different types of questions and, through that, discovering unknown knowns, that which we have had all along but have not had access to.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Aside from creating new things and ideas and putting them into the world, one of the things I find most rewarding about painting is connecting with others through what I make. Art can be about the development and exchange of ideas via objects or concepts. Whether it be collectors, connections though social media, or people who happen to see my work in a gallery or elsewhere, a relationship is built through the work and the ideas that come from the work. Everyone sees and feels different things from a painting, so the connections that are made are varied, different and changing from person to person. Viewers of my work sometimes connect with each other around the work in ways that don’t involve me outside the creation of the work. Paintings and art can help us relate to each other.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.natezoba.com
• Instagram: @natezoba

Image Credits
Kevin McHugh Nate Zoba