Today we’d like to introduce you to Nolan Mueller.
Nolan, before we jump into specific questions about your art, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
About five years ago, my superintendent came to me and asked if I would paint the back of my school. That was the catalyst. I had been to art school, participated in art shows, posted on craigslist, displayed at coffee shops, and of all of the work I had put into it, I wasn’t sure if the whole art thing was going to work out. I was tenacious. That’s really all I can say about myself.
When I graduated from art school, I started substitute teaching during the day and teaching adult painting classes at night. The business was a start-up drink and paint place in Southlake, and I was the first employee they hired. This was like an apprenticeship in more ways than one. I watched how it works to start a business, self-promote, run inventory, maintain supplies, as well as entertain an audience of sixty to eighty adults, invent about one hundred paintings for original content, and simply to teach.
From this same experience, I learned what it looks like when a business fails. That company couldn’t turn a profit, and after some discord between staff and management, I applied to teach art at another start-up company. This time, it was a full-time teaching position in Richardson at an experimental charter school. I got the job and had a hand in building the infrastructure of both that school and the others in the fledgling district. Not only was I teaching art to children, I was helping in all aspects. I had the opportunity to take on a lot of responsibility as more than an art teacher, helping write policy, advising with promotion, setting standards for programs, and at the bottom of it all, pouring my heart into another venture that I got in at the beginning. I found myself becoming an integral part of my new company, albeit a charter school, but from what I learned from conversations with my superintendent, schools are truly a business like anything else. And from her, I saw how headstrong one has to be to keep their dreams alive. Our school faced being shut down in the early years due to low-performance, but we persevered and prevailed. We have since moved our campus to Plano, and now are one of the better schools in DFW.
Meanwhile, I had a yearning to get back to my personal work in art. I had put it off to solidify my position at my school, to learn the ropes of being an art teacher. By the time I had my routine of teaching down pat, my superintendent asked me to paint a mural on the back of the school. I had already painted tons of sets for school functions that I could understand the task to paint on such a large scale. After ten days I had my first real mural under my belt. And that was just the beginning. I started working late, painting new works for shows, applying for other murals, framing painting after painting, and spending hours and hours with my camera and on photoshop, making digital prints.
Everything I did slowly became carefully planned around efficiency. Leftover paint from a portrait commission would be used upon abstract self-expression. Rough sketches for clients would get watercolored and framed and put up in a coffee shop. I developed so many different facets: my personal best cerebral oil paintings, my en-plein-aire watercolors from anywhere I travel, my nude studies, my pen and ink sketches of junk objects, my vibrant colorful trippy oversaturated acrylics of jungles, my children’s book illustrations, my Dallas architectural drawings, my digital mural graphics, and all the other random creations here and there.
Has it been a smooth road?
Getting here has taken a lot of humility. I never say no to an opportunity. Even still, after doing murals and galleries, I still love to show at coffee shops and small artisan shows. Often times, I don’t sell anything. I don’t mind at all though because it still means I woke up and did something that day that was more than just sitting on the couch watching television.
But I stay realistic. I don’t try to sell anything for astronomical prices. You’ve probably been somewhere and seen a painting that looked like a six-year-old made it but the price tag looks like two months’ rent. That’s some lofty thinking, and a level of pretension I don’t subscribe to. I like to make work people can afford. I put myself out there a lot, making copious amounts of work. In fact, when I was a kid, I remember reading about Mozart being prolific, and I think that stuck with me as an adult. I’ve wanted to be prolific.
Some days I paint five watercolor studies. Some days I teach all day and then drive straight to a mural site to paint until midnight, day after day for a month. It’s tough work, but I love it. I didn’t choose the route of being an avant-garde artist, straight out of art school headed for Brooklyn with my cookie-cutter hipster friends. Instead, I saw some local guys like Carl Block, Robert Jessup, and Frank Campagna churning out work day in, day out, and making it work by making work everyday.
One day I’m designing a graphic wall print for a major international client, the next day I’m teaching kindergartners how to weave yarn and then painting a neighbor’s dog for the equivalent of a tank of gas that same afternoon. I don’t do a website because it would look too confusing to see all my work in one place. But it’s work I have come to love. Unicorns for toddlers in acrylic, and historical depictions of American patriots in five-star restaurants. Fifty-three foot long homages to the city of Fort Worth in latex in a datacenter lobby, and goofy caricature of a favorite employee for their going away present. It has been hard work and humility. I’m just thankful I get so many opportunities to create, and with purpose.
We’d love to hear more about your art.
I don’t have a business. I’m just one guy, finding reasons to create. My home is full of my paintings, drawings, watercolors, pottery, photography, and prints. So is my parents’ home, and there’s no more space. So any chance I get to impart my work upon someone else’s walls, I jump at it. The thought of knowing that something I create becomes part of someone else’s life is the deepest level of pride I take in what I do. There’s a guy in Austin named Justin, and he has enough of my art to fill a small gallery. On the far other ends of the spectrum, when I’m done teaching a lesson for something like a drawing of a wolf, or a watercolor of a sunset for my elementary students, I give whoever asks for it my art to take home that day.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
DFW is full of opportunities. There’s no oversaturated market in these cities. Dallas-Fort Worth is big enough to support many artists, and right now, the sky is still the limit. Someone once told me that the sign of a city’s value is the number of construction cranes you see looming over the skyline. DFW has plenty, so as long as the economy is good, we will keep seeing more of the arts, including theater, cinema, art, dance, opera, and the development of culturally interesting neighborhoods. And hopefully, we don’t have to succumb to valet parking and brunch everywhere everyday. But even those things are that bad.
Contact Info:
- Email: relleumnalon@gmail.com
- Instagram: @artbynolan
Image Credit:
All pictures by Nolan Mueller and Monroe Harvey
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