We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nicole Schonitzer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Nicole, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. The first dollar you earn is always exciting – it’s like the start of a new chapter and so we’d love to hear about the first time you sold or generated revenue from your creative work?

The first painting I ever sold went to a guy from my K-12 school who we’ll refer to as Roger. Roger famously got into a senior party as a freshman with a bag of oregano that he claimed was weed. He got in trouble on a middle school field trip to Chinatown for buying fireworks. He was rumored to be a drug dealer now, although no real evidence of what he was actually up to ever came to light. He looked like a hamster had transformed into a human and put on a Billionaire Boys Club t-shirt. He had a quiet, sneaky demeanor that matched his appearance. He was an absolute vibe.

But, Roger and I had been friends as young children and had a good rapport in our pre-teen years. We took Chinese together, a motley crew of a class where a lot of hijinks ensued. Shortly after I graduated from college, I moved back to Chicago and set up shop in my studio apartment in Logan Square. I posted my artist website on Instagram, and Roger messaged me that he enjoyed my work and was wondering if a particular painting was for sale. Said painting was not one of my best in my opinion; a 4’ X 3’ oil painting of a web of pink light prisms connected by blue laser beams with a spacey-teal background. It was one of my first forays into incorporating sci-fi imagery, the handling of the paint was thick and clumsy, and the composition was unresolved. I was happy to sell it off to Roger for some cash.

He offered me $300 for the painting, an absurdly low price for an oil painting of that size, even a subpar one. With little understanding of the market or my worth, I agreed. I told him he could come to my apartment to pick up the painting, but he insisted he didn’t have a car and it wouldn’t fit in an Uber, so I would have to deliver it. Without thinking of charging him for delivery or bringing up that I, too, had no large vehicle at hand, I agreed again.

So, me and the painting took two CTA buses to Roger’s apartment. I carried the painting totally unwrapped by the stretcher for all the people of the bus to see. The friendly folks on the ride from Avondale to Lakeview were very complimentary. One person delightedly told me it reminded them of the opening credits of 2002’s Spiderman, a fair observation. When I arrived at Roger’s lakefront high-rise, the doorman sent me up the elevator with a woman who asked me if I was a “local artist”, a term only other artists understand the deeply cutting feel of. I missed the people on the bus.

Roger greeted me at the door of his apartment, which looked like it shared an interior decorator with Donald Trump. Everything was gold. He immediately began admiring the painting and showing me the prominent wall space he planned to give it. It was going in the entryway, so you’d see it first thing when you came in. Despite his otherwise questionable taste in décor, I was flattered. As we chatted, I could hear rustling around from the other side of the apartment. I dismissed it as white noise, but suddenly another guy appeared from behind the couch on the other side of the room, whom Roger introduced to me as his friend. He looked and was dressed exactly like Roger. I wanted to know at what young hamster-esque men’s streetwear gathering they had met, but that would forever remain a mystery.

We discussed payment, and Roger insisted on paying me in cash, which I could see he had plenty of when he opened his wallet. I went down the elevator with a fistful of twenties, never to see him again.

There were many lessons to be learned here about being fairly compensated and what to ask of a client. I would learn those down the line. I had gotten a close-up glimpse of Roger’s uncanny world and the satisfaction of making my first real sale, and that story and feeling would stay with me much longer than the $300 I had received. Despite your best efforts, your first sales likely won’t be very fair or lucrative, but maybe a little grin will creep up on your face every time someone mentions 2002’s Spiderman for the rest of your days.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a multidisciplinary visual artist and curator living and working in Brooklyn NY. Recently, I’ve been focused on painting, drawing, and sculpture, but I run the gamut with different media and have worked in installation, screen printing, and stop motion animation, to name a few others. I’m currently working on two series. The Moon is Getting Closer is comprised of a series of soft-sculptural paintings, a series of drawings, and a book of those drawings with my original text that will come out later this year. This body of work is an extension of the world-building aspect of my practice in which my creatures (my guys) exist in a bizzaro world where they inhabit bathrooms and bodily chambers. The guys engage in symbiotic, interspecies relationships with each other, free from the pressures and limitations of our reality. In The Moon is Getting Closer, I posit that the moon is moving back towards the earth. I created a non-linear narrative around how the Guys would react to this development and invented a pseudoscience about how the reversal of the moon’s trajectory would affect the world. I also have a running series of reverse ekphrasis paintings after Gertrude Stein’s, Tender Buttons. Each painting is based on a different segment in the “Food” portion of the text. With these pieces, I work through translating Stein’s abstract language into abstract imagery. I’m tickled by the absurd, impossible task of trying to illustrate the non-illustrative passages.

Making physical objects has always been a major part of my life, and during college, I discovered I felt most at home around other artists and most engaged in conversations about art. It was then that I decided to pursue it in a more professional capacity. I’m most proud that my work unashamedly relies heavily on imagination and play. I take my art seriously, and I think its thematic implications are often political, but at its core it’s driven by pleasure and fun. I want to take viewers to a place where those desires are valued.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Give artists money! Creatives would thrive if they were fairly compensated for their work and weren’t constantly forced to scheme to make art and live decently. Between my junior and senior years of college, I interned at Americans for the Arts, the country’s largest arts advocacy nonprofit. During a lunch and learn, the head of the organization once talked to us about how advancing arts funding in the U.S. is such an uphill battle because our country was founded with the puritanical idea that art is a luxurious indulgence, and this vein of thinking is still fairly prominent among many American people and leaders. I think there’s some real truth to that idea, and I think for the arts to truly thrive we need a radical cultural shift about the value of art; that it’s not an ‘extra’ but a fundamental part of how humans have always lived. I’m not sure when or if that revolution is coming, but I do think there are models in other countries where public funding for art and artists is a way bigger priority.
On a micro level, individuals could also contribute to a more vibrant arts economy. If people went to open studio events or reached out to creatives online and bought a $300 work for their apartment from an emerging artist instead of spending that money on a mass-produced print from a corporation, artists would be better off and everyone’s walls would be less generic and ugly. I think there needs to be stronger messaging to the general public that original art can be accessible, but getting that message out there takes time and resources artists themselves don’t always have.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wished I knew how important it was to make connections with your artistic community and that I had taken more initiative with building those. Between undergrad and graduate school, I moved back to Chicago and was making work in my apartment there. It was hard to feel excited about what I was doing when I had no peers around for encouragement, motivation, or to share tips about opportunities with. Chicago has a cool art scene, and people there are really friendly overall, but I can be a shy person, and I felt too afraid to go to openings on my own and meet people at that time in my life. When I went to RISD for my MFA, I made friends with my cohort and have since found an artist community in Brooklyn. I’m grateful that everything worked out, but I could’ve had a richer artistic life much earlier had I pushed myself out of my comfort zone a bit more socially. To anyone struggling with finding an artistic community or who’s nervous about meeting people on your own, I’d encourage you to remember that most artists are other weirdos who want to welcome you in.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nicoleschonitzer.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/schonitzertime/