Nate Otto is a Chicago-based visual artist. In addition to doing client work for big names including Vans, Chase Bank, NPR, and Goose Island, Nate has held art shows across the United States.
Don: What is your earliest memory of creating art?
Nate: I have been making art for as long as I can remember. I was always drawing. I had other interests as a kid as well, but making art has been a top interest since I was very young. I was always the kid in class who had his drawing held up by the teacher. I got it in my head early on that making art for a living wasn’t something that was actually possible, and unfortunately I held that attitude well into adulthood, and I spent a lot of time biding my time with other jobs while making art on the side, but I’ve been a full time artist now for several years. Drawing and painting mean everything to me, and when I’m creating art I am very happy.
Don: What jobs did you work before you became a full-time artist? Was there a specific moment when you realized being a full-time artist was feasible for you?
Nate: I always had to support myself, and I always treated jobs as just a thing I had to do to pay the rent while my focus was on creating things when I wasn’t at work. As a result, I never really excelled in the workplace. Making other people money was never a big motivation for me. At one point, I tried to do graphic design because it was somewhat close to doing art, but I found that using my creative energy at work left less creative juice for the evenings. I worked for several years as a teacher for adults with developmental disabilities, because I had the right temperament for it, and if I had to work a job I figured I should at least be helping people. I’m not the most subservient person, though, and working within an organization where I have several bosses is not an environment in which I thrive. At some point I figured that the job was a dead end, and I thought about going to grad school for various things, but I decided to double down on the art instead and I started working much harder to transition to being a full time artist. Ultimately, I figured that not only was art my true calling and what I wanted to do with my time, but it was also my most marketable skill.
I left my last full time job in 2012, and initially I worked a couple nights a week as a door guy at a bar, just to give myself a little bit of cash to take the pressure off, but after a year or so I stopped doing that so I could focus on art and art-related work completely. Luckily, I never made that much money in my old job, so it wasn’t an extremely tall order to replace that income. Ironically, if I had done better in the workforce it may have been more difficult to transition. I wouldn’t say that there was a specific moment when I realized I could be a full-time artist. It was just something that built up over time and at a certain point it seemed foolish to do anything else.
Don: Your sprawling cityscape murals are perhaps what you’re best known for. How did you get your start with those drawings? What does a city mean to you?
Nate: The cityscape thing really just evolved into existence from the process of making work. Back in the early 2000s, I was doing large abstract expressionist paintings that I thought of as landscapes. The buildings starting appearing a few years later, and it just evolved as a style that I pushed and developed in different directions. The city is my landscape. I have lived in the city of Chicago for over 20 years and when my wife and I travel we pretty much travel to other cities. I’ve been exploring drawing and painting various types of cities, maps, and landscapes for over a decade, and I just pursue whichever direction I feel like going. I see myself as an abstract painter and I use the buildings as a medium to express my ideas of shape and color. People sometimes ask me if I’m still doing the buildings thing, and I say that I am, but if you look at the work there is a huge amount of variety and exploration within the confines of simply drawing buildings.
Don: On your website you describe your art as occupying “its own lane somewhere in between the worlds of folk art, street art, lowbrow art, and contemporary fine art”. In your eyes, what differentiates lowbrow art and fine art?
Nate: I went to art school and I have also been greatly inspired by things that are outside of the fine art cannon. For years I avoided trying to make a career out of art because I was turned off and intimidated by the art world and all the potential gatekeepers who could decide if I was sophisticated enough to be granted access to that world. At a certain point I just decided to focus on my work, make as much good art as possible, and to make my body of work undeniable. For whatever reason, the street art world is where I have gotten the most traction, even though I’ve never made the claim of being a street artist. I’ve shown in “folk art” galleries, and “low brow” galleries. I really don’t care about the labels. I’m just trying to make work that like and to show it. As long as I’m making good stuff and I’m working hard, opportunities seem to come my way. If I waited around for someone to invite me in, none of this would have ever happened and I would still be making art on the side. I could give lengthy descriptions of the different art worlds, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the quality of the work, and my focus is on making the work as good as possible.
Don: What differentiates the Chicago art scene from the rest of the country (aside from the cold)?
Nate: I’ve shown a few times in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and other places and I’ve done murals in different parts of the country, but Chicago is my home base and where I get the vast majority of my opportunities. As an art town, Chicago is largely ignored by the “art scene,” but it is a large economy, and as a result, opportunities present themselves. I know a lot of other artists in Chicago and I try to be supportive of artists I like, but I’m not aware of being part of any scene. I’m just keeping my head down and making work. With the internet I’m not sure how much location matters. Chicago is my home and where I plan on being for the future, so I take the mentality that if I build it they will come, and what I am building is a body of work.
Don: What occupies your time outside of art?
Nate: I have a young baby, and I enjoy spending time with him and my wife. Over the years, I have had a lot of other interests. At one point, I fancied myself as a writer, and I’ve spent a lot of time making music that no one likes. When I was younger, I played a lot of pickup basketball and I used to go out a lot. These days, though, all I want to do is work on my art. Outside of spending time with my family and a handful of friends that I make an effort to see, all I do is paint, draw, and work on art projects for clients. Making art is really all I want to do now. I feel like I wasted too much time when I was younger and now I just want to work. I really love what I do.
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