Call it ‘love/hate’

Haim Shiff prizewinner David Nipo on ambivalence,talent and exhibiting for the first time at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

By CARL HOFFMAN
‘Self Portrait, Painting Winter 1,’ 2002. (photo credit: Courtesy)
‘Self Portrait, Painting Winter 1,’ 2002.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Which is worse – to completely lack talent in something you love, or to be extraordinarily talented at something you hate? Artist David Nipo knows the answer to that one. The critically acclaimed artist has been involved in what he describes as a “love/hate relationship with painting” for much of his life.
Born almost 50 years ago in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Nipo came to Israel at the age of five, grew up in Ashdod, spent many years in Tel Aviv – “until I got fed up with it,” he says – and now lives in the countrified atmosphere of Nir Akiva in the northwestern Negev with his wife and four children. His paintings have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. He has won several grants and awards – including the National Portrait Gallery in London’s BP Portrait Award in 2009 and 2013. And last year he was chosen, out of 65 other artists, to receive the Haim Shiff Prize for Figurative-Realistic Art, which confers a cash award of $10,000 and the guarantee of a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
That exhibition, titled “I Returned, and Saw under the Sun,” opened last month and will run through October. It features a series of lush landscape and outdoor images, a group of intricately painted small studies, several striking portraits, and a number of recent works detailing everything from birth to death and the murky tableau of life in between. The style of the paintings ranges from portraits that are virtually photographic in light and detail to lonely, almost somber country roads and sun-scorched fields that stretch to an endless horizon.
Some of the paintings are so realistic that they leave nothing to the imagination; others are dark and ambiguous, drawing the viewer into the scene with puzzlement and fascination.
I caught up with Nipo at the museum a few days before the exhibition opening, and he discussed his views on art, talent, issues of personal identity, and making peace with oneself and one’s destiny. The first thing I noticed was the paint all over his hands.
You’ve got paint on your hands at the moment. Are you still producing paintings for the exhibition at this late date? No. I’m changing the colors of some of the frames, which were terrible.
At what point in your life did you start to paint? I have memories of myself drawing at the age of three. When I was five years old, I decided I wanted to be a painter. But once you make a decision like that, things tear, and things break. Relationships change. I’ve thus had many, many years of a kind of love/hate relationship with painting. I guess since the moment I realized it was my calling, my destiny, I tried to rebel against it. I wanted to paint, and I hated wanting to paint. When I didn’t paint, I felt like I was sinning, and then I hated it even more.
Do you do anything else? I’m a husband and father.
Yes, but do you have what some writers, actors and others call a ‘day job’? No, no, no. This is what I do. I teach painting, but lately I barely do that.
Can you teach talent? I have no presumption of teaching “talent.”
I don’t believe in talent, actually.
So what is it that separates you from the rest of us? What separates me from the rest of you? I’m trying to find out what connects me to the rest of you! I believe talent is many things. In the very core of that term, talent is social manipulation, of depriving the deprived and sustaining the privileged. It’s a way of keeping someone down and elevating someone else. I believe that talent is a gift that is given to everyone. The point is to nourish that gift, to bring it out. It’s like polishing a mirror to make it as “mirrory” as it can possibly be. To fulfill its existence to the maximum.
I believe that every person must polish himself until he brings himself to the maximum.
This is a life quest.
You can call this “talent,” but I think this is a word that is used to separate people, like you said – to separate me from the rest of you. I don’t believe in that concept at all.
Was figurative art something to which you were naturally drawn? I can tell you two anecdotes that defined what for me was inevitable. One is when I was around 12 years old. I was standing by the window, looking outside. There were some children playing a ball game. I was standing there looking at them, when suddenly my focus shifted. Instead of looking outside, I began to focus on the window pane itself. I noticed a speck of dirt stuck to the glass. It was around 2 mm. in diameter – just a piece of dirt. And I focused on it and I found it so complex in shape and topography, so beautiful! And the next thing I did was to get a piece of paper and a pencil.
I stood there for hours and just drew that that nothingness! It was so beautiful, so minute.
The other anecdote is me sitting and doodling. This was when I was around 40. I’d had social issues as a child. I wasn’t the most popular kid, to say the least. I didn’t want to be popular; I just wanted to fit in. I loved company, I craved social relationships, but it didn’t work. Nothing I did worked. The turning point was when I was around 14 years old. So I’m around 40, drawing, and I realized that the drawing I came up with was one of boxing in front of a mirror. I realized I was thinking and elaborating on my emotional state in that picture. In one picture, I was defining what was going on in my life. I was reflecting on my malaise.
Do you still have the piece of paper on which you drew the dirt speck on the window? No.
Is there any form or style of painting to which you don’t respond, or that you simply don’t like? I don’t understand the term “painting style.” I don’t deal with “style.” The only art I appreciate is good art, and the only art I don’t appreciate is bad art. How can I define “good” and “bad”? It’s a felt thing.
We all know – at least if we keep ourselves awake and are not zombies – we all know when something touches us, moves us, or doesn’t. And it has nothing to do with style. It has to do with relevance and honesty.
That’s all. And those are totally subjective.
Everything is subjective.
Who was your major influence? My father. I have many artists who influenced me, but my father was my main and eternal mentor.
What would you do if you couldn’t paint? I didn’t paint for nine years. I told you about my love/hate relationship with painting. It got to a peak when my father died when I was 22 years old. I felt like I had nobody to paint for anymore.
That was the core of our relationship.
My father was an amateur painter, and it was our mutual fascination. It didn’t happen immediately, but little by little I began to neglect painting until I neglected it completely. I did scenic art for a living, but I did nothing of my own work for nine years.
At that time, I wasn’t just “not painting.”
I was in psychological treatment.
And that “not painting” was a decision I made at that time. I said, enough with that love/hate game. Because that love/ hate game is not with painting, the love/ hate game is with myself. Painting is not a real entity. So what was very important for me was that I would be able to appreciate myself, accept myself. And I decided I didn’t want to be a painter. I wanted to love myself for who I am, not for just being a painter. And it took me that time, nine years, to come back to painting, without hating my father, without hating anything else. It was just time. I was ready. I accepted myself as David Nipo, not as “the painter.” I made peace with me. It was a good time to make choices, and I chose painting again.
Do any of your children want to be painters? I don’t know. I’m not the type of father who asks them what they want to be when they get older. I just try to let them experience life. I try to do my best not to be pushy as a father, although I am generally pushy in life. You can’t be someone who strives to bring about the manifestation of ideas and not be pushy.
How do you feel about winning the prize? And what’s next for you after this exhibition? I’ll continue to do the same thing I do all the time. The prize is just an arbitrary point in my life. It has no meaning of its own. Of course, I was happy when I got the prize. Acknowledgment is something we all strive for. But to tell the truth, the prize didn’t just start last year. For many years I didn’t want the prize. Only last year did I want it. I had wanted to get into this museum through the front door, by virtue of my work, and not through the back door, as the winner of a prize. I find the first way more respectable.
But if it has to be this way, by winning the prize, then that is how it must be.
“I Returned, and Saw Under the Sun” is on display through October 18 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 27 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard – Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Tuesday and Thursday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. For further information: (03) 607-7020 or www.tamuseum.com.