Artist Profile: Dean Nimmer

Artist Dean Nimmer was the profiled artist in the March/April 2018 issue of Cloth Paper Scissors. This self-proclaimed art preacher had so much to share, we couldn’t fit it all in the issue! Enjoy more of his unique personality and art here, along with some great information on beginning a series, creating random collage, and gathering ideas and materials to motivate and inspire. Enjoy.

Cloth Paper Scissors: Did you grow up in a creative family? Did your parents encourage you to be an artist?

Dean: My parents were florists, and I didn’t really come to appreciate their creativity in floral design until sometime later in life. They encouraged me, but mostly because they didn’t know how else to deal with my out-of-control energy.

Looking back, I realize I grew up in a very creative environment, albeit one of my own making. I most remember the 10 vast sandboxes in my back yard, put there to hold varieties of shrubs sold for landscaping. During the late spring and early fall, these huge sandboxes became fantasy landscapes with Martian-like terrain pocked with meteor craters, or vast mountain ranges formed by the ghosts of the departed bushes leaving their giant footprints for me to play in. This sandbox fantasyland supercharged my imagination and creative curiosity.

Cloth Paper Scissors: You were a professional drummer when you were younger; did your interest in music precede your interest in art, or have they gone hand-in-hand throughout your life?

Dean: It’s funny; people think I’m a musician because I played drums with a group called The Baroques about 50 years ago. My group had some notoriety for being the first white, non-blues band on Chess records, and we had a relatively big following way back when. It was very odd for this up-start group, playing so-called psychedelic rock with some unusual twists, to come out of that bastion of blues and soul.

I never considered myself to be a professional musician, nor was I ever involved in music to the extent I was involved in art, but I’m not going out of my way to dispel the rumors. Nevertheless, I played the drums since I was about eight years old, and I still have a kit in my basement today. The distinction I would make is that I played drums because it was so much fun, but I never thought of it as a career. I always played the drums the way I painted, playing by ear and not caring about proper technique.

Cloth Paper Scissors: In your book Creating Abstract Art you encourage readers to invent an artistic alter ego. Tell us more about that.

Dean: My “mini me”— Unique Fredrique—is not at all interested in good art, aesthetics, art history, or any other conventions or proprieties of the art world, including making anything that qualifies as abstract art. As a matter of fact, he is a steadfast nonconformist who paints, draws, and sculpts however he wants by depicting his own ideas of realism.

Unique’s personality comes from my insatiable drive to create without being bound by the conventional norms of what is acceptable picture making for a “serious” painter. Of course, anytime you start thinking about what your audience might say about your work, you’re already in trouble. But with an alter ego who doesn’t care about such things as good taste in art or being true to the style of the art you’re known for, you can pretty much do anything you want and blame it on your alter ego.

The idea that you make up a quirky character that masquerades as your other self is not necessarily for everyone, particularly if this whole notion strikes you as just farcical nonsense. I chose to make up this character because my own sense of humor—something I hold dear to the nature of who I am—is necessarily restrained from joining the process when I’m making my “serious” abstract paintings and drawings. And when you restrain something as exuberant and persistent as your sense of humor, it necessarily takes away some of the joy you feel when making art. So, on those occasions when I’ve built up frustration over not letting the child in me participate in the process, Unique Fredrique comes to the rescue and lets me just have fun.

I don’t think that engaging an alter ego to create bizarre and peculiar art is a deception about who I am as an artist. Rather, adopting an alter ego personality extends the breadth of who I am as an artist, so that I know there are no boundaries to enjoying the process of making art if you just let go.

Cloth Paper Scissors: What kinds of classes are you teaching now?

Dean: I teach a wide variety of topics in day and week-long classes focused on enjoying the process of making art. Believe it or not, one of the most popular workshops is called Stop Whining and Draw! I think the reason for its popularity is that many artists know they spend a lot of time thinking and worrying about the same old stuff: What’s a good subject to paint? Will people like this piece? Will this work be any good? Deliberating questions like that is classic art moaning that takes the place of art making, and conceding to our own artistic angst is always a huge waste of time. So, in order to avoid roadblocks like this, you need to consider that art making is a process that doesn’t need justification. To that end, this class starts with making things from the very beginning of the class, and the making doesn’t stop until we clean up. There’s no time to think or judge what you are doing when art making is a verb.

Cloth Paper Scissors: You once made 1,000 drawings in a year’s time. Tell us more about why this was an important milestone for you?

Dean: In 1996, I began a series of 1,000 drawings to do in a year as a kind of marathon to push myself to create as many different images in different ways to stimulate my own creativity. This project is an on-going endeavor that is always there to prod me into new possibilities for making art.

One of the best ways I know to keep yourself focused in art is to become engrossed in creating a series of interrelated works that you carry on for an extended period of time. Based on the series idea, try making at least 20 sketches from the list of potential themes (below), using them as a starting point for an abstract series. Without thinking too much about what something should look like, just go with it. “Sketches” means any simple and direct way to create something.

Once you get the idea of how broad a spectrum there is for beginning a series, you should be able to swim on your own with this project.

• Create 20 landscape sketches from memories of places you’ve lived in the past.
• Use only three colors in 20 abstract compositions.
• Use the clock in your bedroom as a subject for 20 sketches.
• Use only diagonal marks in 20 sketches.
• Describe what’s under the earth’s crust in 20 sketches.
• Draw abstract thermometers in 20 sketches.
• Draw the texture of rattlesnake skin in 20 sketches.
• Put a dot on a piece of paper and make 20 sketches that abstractly explain where the dot is going.

Once you start drawings like this, you’ll realize there are limitless subjects to draw or paint.

More Art Ideas from Dean

Idea Log

Idea Logs emphasize gathering all forms of spontaneous drawings, unstructured notations, random texts, open-ended lists, and simple doodles, all pooled in one place to motivate your imagination and creativity. They can be part handwritten diaries that keep notations inspired by your experiences, past, present, and future. But unlike artist books, journals, or diaries, in an Idea Log you needn’t follow any traditional forms of prescribed chronology—you just make it up as you go along.

Idea Logs focus on gathering your thoughts to use for your art, using any sources you find interesting. This type of sketchbook presents innumerable possibilities that may or may not become finished artworks developed from your roughs. Think of Idea Logs as a kind of an insurance policy against being artistically blocked or stuck in an art rut, making the same things over and over again. Like anything worth doing, you have to get started making Idea Logs before it’s lost on an ancient to-do list.

Random Collage

If you want to get exotic, try doing a random collage. This is not a traditional collage technique, but one that adds risk taking and chance as active components in the process. This project was inspired by art games made up by Dada/Surrealist groups that sought to take away artistic control of the process so the resulting composition was purely accidental and unpredictable.

Removing your ability to control the outcome of your composition can be unnerving and liberating at the same time – i.e., having fun with your boundaries. This unorthodox process is similar to exercises like painting blindfolded or doing line contour studies, where you’re not looking at the paper. When you can’t see what you’re making, you can’t expect the resulting image to match your expectations, and you always get something surprising. Releasing control can expand your artistic vocabulary in ways that you never expected and rejuvenate creative sparkplugs that were getting rusty.

There are many ways to go about making a random collage that range from having the result be completely up to chance, to having at least one stage of a composition be determined by a roll of the dice. You can use the following list of potential rules as a guide for deciding how much control you want to have in the collage you make.

Possible rules for the 2-D or 3-D collage
The materials you use can:

• Be found on the street by chance.
• Come from other people’s trash.
• Come from a flea market or thrift shop.
• Start with rubbings made from random surfaces.
• Come from trading collage scraps with a partner.
• Be from a bag put together by someone else, and you have to pick things out of the bag without looking.

Give Random Collage a try and see what happens.