Interview

He used to cover gallery walls with bullet holes. But he’s ­traded in the gun for a smiley face. Has the bad boy artist finally gone soft? Or is the smiley face smiling about something weird and terrible?

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Leo Fitzpatrick attempted to interview Nate Lowman twice before they finally got it right. The first time was rushed. The second time they got way too wasted and spent most of the exchange looking at YouTube videos in the downtown New York City studio Lowman shares with fellow artist Dan Colen. (Sample of transcript: LF: hat’s the guy I’m going to grow up to be. I’m gonna turn into that guy one day, trying to sell Winnebagos on TV but forgetting his lines, and he freaks out and goes, “Fuck everything.”) The third time they met a little more soberly and managed to get to the bottom of Lowman’s series of smiley-face paintings and drawings that he’s making for his solo show this month at New York’s maccarone gallery. The new subject matter is a bit of a departure, since the 30-year-old artist’s previous work has involved screen-printed bullet holes and ironic bumper stickers turned into devious linguistic assaults. Fitzpatrick and Lowman are, in fact, very close friends, and they can often be found deejaying together at various clubs around the city. If you ever run into either of these guys in the morning, it usually means they’ve been up all night working. 

LEO FITZPATRICK: What attempt are we on now?

NATE LOWMAN: This is the third time, which will be the charm. 

LF: A lot of people probably think it’s easy for two friends to get together and do an interview. Is it hard for you to talk about your work?

NL: Yeah, it’s hard. The work is on your mind so much that when someone asks you to talk about it, it’s like, “Which part?” I have all these scribbles of smiley faces in my studio that friends do when they come over—yourself included. Try to explain that project to people. I’m afraid the more I talk about it and try to make sense of it in my mind, the more I’ll jinx it. My friend Jeff Elrod once saw a painting in his head, and then he couldn’t make it. We used to share a studio, and he did these abstract paintings with tape and flat colors, and sometimes he’d be like, “Oh, I know what the painting’s going to look like, so I don’t need to make it. I know it’s a great painting.” He had it in his head, and it was never going to leave, and he got to live with it. I was always like, “Dude, just do it anyway.” It was like he didn’t want to get bored by his own ideas so he didn’t go through with them. I do that too, but think about how ungenerous that is. All you have is this secret, and nobody else gets to share it.