Interview with Artist Nina Talbot

              Nina Talbot's works are rich with stories, personal histories and the emotional explorations of both a sense of place and often loss of place. She focuses in on how people from various elsewhere's keep their cultural compass points near, how they adapt and what becomes of neighborhoods and spaces once they slowly erode the signs of these precious personal and cultural histories. Like a good folk song Nina's work carries these stories into the future, bearing the prevalent marks and sometimes scars of their past, these pieces are their own type of compass, without works and stories like these how easily we would be lost. Anti-Heroin Chic recently interviewed Nina, here she talks more about her process and the inspiration behind these works:


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AHC: Can you tell us a bit about your process, themes & inspirations?

​Nina: I organize my paintings by series. I am interested in history: communities, war veterans, survivors and people in my neighborhood and family. Some of the more recent series I have worked within so far include The Shoprite Series, Vendors of Newkirk, Generations of Brooklyn, Neighborhood Folks and Faces of Dynów. I am interested in the story behind the face. The paintings are narrative portraits based on personal interviews, in which I come to know the person, and what they’ve experienced in their lives. I work with people whose lives have intersected with historical events such as war, survival and immigration.

Vendors of Newkirk is a series that explores several of these themes by virtue of the people I came to know. In the painting Hot Bagels, there is a small sign in the background announcing, “We now have cappuccino!” This detail is a nod to the advent of gentrification, which is affecting all of our communities- not always in a positive sense. My mission was to portray the community in constant and rapid transition; mementos of an evanescent moment.

In Neighborhood Folks, I sought to portray people that we may see only for a fleeting moment in our neighborhood. Their visages hint at their past and their present-- a battle scar, a hijab, platinum blonde hair. The paintings in these series tell the stories of what these faces have seen.

One never knows what the guy behind the counter in the corner bodega has gone through. In the painting Ben, the man who sold jewelry in his shop on my local shopping strip was kidnapped by military police when he was trying to escape Iran when he was a teenager. He was brought to an underground prison and tortured. Miraculously his parents found him and bribed the guards to free their son out of that situation. When Ben was sponsored to come to America, on his first night in a hotel, he was robbed of his ten dollars in the elevator. These are snippets of stories I’ve heard just for the asking.

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AHC: What first drew you to art? 

Nina: I am lucky that I always knew I wanted to be a painter from the time I was a young girl. I went to the High School of Music & Art in NYC, and consider that time to be the beginning of my career. It was a luxury and hard to believe that we students spent at least half of the school day in art classes!

​Growing up in NYC is an amazing place for a budding artist. The museums became my living rooms.

AHC: There are a lot of personal connections & in depth narrative behind a lot of your subjects, what is that process like, how do you form & build those relationships through the work?

Nina: It thrills and surprises me that the people who become my painting subjects share intimate stories of their lives with me--a complete stranger! I think the reason is that it is a cathartic experience for people to have someone interested in them and their lives. A great example of this is the work I did interviewing, researching and painting American war veterans for the Veterans series.

Usually one series will segue into another one. When I was coming towards the completion of the Neighborhood Folks series, I only realized towards the end, that I was painting portraits of people who represented various aspects of the community. I had painted immigrant shopkeepers in their stores, an elder historian who was active in mobilizing the residents in their housing project to fight eviction, and more.

That is when I thought, “Of course I have to paint a war veteran.” With the current raging conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and the multitudes of injured soldiers returning home, many with PTSD, I needed to paint a veteran. After interviewing my first one, a Desert Storm vet who wore prosthetics, I realized I needed to dedicate a whole series to these men and women.

​Naturally I have become friends with many of the people I have painted- it’s a great way to meet interesting people! And it is also very emotional as there is no way that the emotions don’t creep into my painting process. Actually the interviews are the basis of the paintings. I take notes during the interviews, and lately use a digital recorder. Then I type and print out my notes, which I use as the starting point for a painting. Often the hardest part of this process is editing out, as it would be difficult to include all of the elements of the stories I hear.

AHC: Your work profoundly explores the themes of history & sense of place, how the past continually informs the present, can you talk about that aspect of your work?

Nina: Reflecting on my old-time New York, I often wonder if some of the people and places I paint will still be here in five, ten, twenty years. Will the storekeeper from Tajikistan, and the one from Ghana hold on to their culture, or mesh completely into the American landscape?

​The aspect of time in the sense of intersections of personal lives and world events is a strong force in my work. I think about the accident of birth, and where we are when events occur. The experiences of the people I’ve come to know fascinate me because of how their personal lives intersect with history.

​The young writer from Haiti who witnessed killings by the tonton macoutes affected her life AND what she chose to write about. A young woman who struggled to find her parents after an earthquake in Japan walks with those images. These are folks whose stories are worth hearing about for our generations, now and in the future. It behooves our upcoming generations to hear  the stories of those who came before us.

AHC: Do you have any upcoming exhibits or projects you'd like to tell people about?

Nina: An excerpt of the female soldiers my Veterans series of paintings- are currently on display at The Women In Service to America Memorial at the front of Arlington Cemetery, and will be there until March 2017.

Another exhibition of Veterans will travel to The Louisiana National Guard Museum in New Orleans in November of this year, and remain on display for a year.

My current series of paintings, Faces of Dynów, documents the murder of 40 members of my family by Nazis in their Polish town in 1939. The paintings depict the lives of people from the town against a backdrop of the history of the town during the pre-war 1920s and 1930s to the present day. Portrait subjects are part of my family tree by way of ancestral, familial and spiritual connections, a tree broken by the travails of war and imprisonment.

I traveled there in 2013, 2014 and last year where I learned the extent of this horrible chapter. Since then I’ve been researching my family genealogy and interviewing people who currently live in the town, and some elders who survived that live in New York.

​An article that tells of this project appears in The Galitzianer, a journal of Gesher Galitzia.
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To find more of Nina's work and for further information visit her website at ninatalbot.com/