Feature Fridays | Nick Kolobov

In conversation with Life Drawing Coordinator Eleanor Milner

Nick is a third year from London who studies English and Russian. His principle mediums for painting are acrylics and oils, which he uses in figurative pieces and portraiture. There are often abstract or pop art elements to his pieces.

What are your inspirations at the moment?

Usually my friends, the people around me and random people. Also sometimes writing that I come across or that I write myself… that’s interesting to me, especially with digital art and adding texts to work.

Do you have any artists that you’re inspired by at the moment?

Absolutely! There’s an American artist who emigrated to the UK in the early 70s. I’m obsessed with her; her name is Jacqueline Morreau. She toured an incredible exhibition around the UK called Women’s Images of Men, kind of reclaiming bodies. She’s so cool and very eloquent in the way she describes her art. I love her style, my portraiture style is definitely very indebted to her!

Another artist is Edith Simon, a really cool Scottish artist who was a Jewish migrant artist from the Second World War from Germany. But she lived in Edinburgh her whole adult life and worked in every medium and was a really seminal art figure in Edinburgh. And also affordable! I feel like people think art is really unaffordable but if you find something you really love I really believe in purchasing and having it in your space to bring you joy.

When and how did you first become interested in art making?

Oh God… Probably not very funky to say but as a child I really enjoyed reading and then when I became a teenager I had a phase where I thought it was really uncool to read so I started reading comic books, thinking that will get me street cred, little did I know that’s even less cool! And then I read a lot of Alan Moore, and then I started thinking that I might enjoy writing but if I wanted to make comic books, I should teach myself to draw. I was completely self-taught until I went to school where I had the most incredible art department, I was so privileged and lucky to have that, and then my style and practise developed at school, but I’ve always drawn things. When I first moved to London, I was 10 years old and we had to leave all our toys and belongings behind in Canada. So, my sister and I didn’t have anything to play with so we would draw these cartoons on paper and cut them out like little paper dolls. I think then was when I thought that art can actually facilitate playfulness and happiness.

What sort of themes are you interested in within your art?

I like something whimsical, something peculiar about a piece… I think something off-centre and figurative, something that looks kind of off… if there’s nothing funny about it then it just doesn’t appeal to me. Something funny and comical but at the same time, something that can send quite a serious message. 

What does creativity and art making mean to you?

For me, there was definitely a community of people who studied art at school. When you study art at school I think there’s a misperception that it’s easy, but there’s definitely more to it at the higher levels of art… it isn’t entirely subjective. Also, what it gives you is a real sense of community and a way of meeting artists and a connection to other people. A lot of my friends who are my life-long friends I met through art. I guess it’s a nice by-product or consequence of doing art, meeting cool people.

How does making art in St Andrews differ to doing it at home in London and does it differ here?

I think St Andrews is an interesting place to create art. The nice thing about being in London is that when you’ve grown up somewhere, you’re used to it, you have materials - they’re just on the table and they’ve always been there. Whereas in St Andrews you might need scissors and you think, “Well, I’ve never needed scissors as a student before and now I need them”, so you go to Tesco and they don’t have scissors and etc… There’s a comfort in your own space. In St. Andrews I’ve only ever lived in a space for one year, I’ve moved every year and I’ll probably move again as I love the process of redecorating and creating my space. But once my space is created then my process is very similar to in London. 

The cool thing about St. Andrews is that there’s a really big artistic community; the people are incredible as well and everyone is very creative. Now it feels very similar to being in London as I’ve been here for three years now and the scissors are now on the table here too. 

Have you felt that Covid has had any impact on your themes or process of art making?

I think it’s forced me to use things that I probably should have finished a long time ago, recycling ideas from a long time ago.

Now, working with digital art… I think that the Instagram slide feature is so cool, I love it! It’s a very interesting phenomenon that everyone has these pages of images that they walk around with that are specifically curated to look and embody them. I don’t think people overthink it that much but when you look at someone’s Instagram you can really read a person from their curated selection of images. I remember my art teacher always told me at school that if you lived in medieval period, or even like two hundred years ago, the level of images that you were exposed to was so much smaller, because you would see images in church, maybe images in a book if you could afford to buy a book, or if you could read. That was very much it, there wasn’t advertising like there is today, there would maybe be a drawing on a pub, not like today where we’re constantly bombarded with images. Especially with Corona, it’s quite almost comical to see how quickly those images adapted to Corona; watching an advert on TV a week after lockdown started and already the advertising spoke about us being in lockdown. It was so bizarre how much we’re exposed to images now, so definitely during Corona I felt I needed to peel myself away from a screen and go back to the journals I had as a 12 or 13 year old and read cringey things that I wrote and maybe re-adapt them to be kind of funny and create some kind of image, which was really fun to do… and also really awkward because when you’re 12-13 you’re filled with teenage angst and you think you’re Keats and you’re really not - you’re just 12. So, I think Corona made me re-assess, probably a conventional response, and try to use less new images and go back to some older ones!

 How did you start getting into digital art and how has it affected your process of art making?

Like I said I was always interested in comic books and then when Instagram came out with the slide feature, it is just like a comic book right? I used to scan in my pencil drawings, but they look so terrible when you scan them in, they lose something. So, then I just gave up and I thought “Oh, its fine ill just do it on the screen immediately” and then it saved me having to scan it in. And then at school again just as a method of exploration… it’s not fancy digital art it’s just the Picsart app and my finger, just drawing and tracing!

Is there anything you’ve been working on recently?

I was writing an essay about Orlando by Woolf, actually shout out to Professor Emma Sutton, such an incredible person! The novel starts in the Elizabethan period and progresses to the modern day, so what I wanted to do in the essay was somehow mimic that visually, even though it’s just a 2,500-word essay. You know how in medieval manuscripts they have those dropped capitals, those fancy letters at the start of paragraphs, so I collated a collection of dropped capitals and kind of collaged them into the work, kind of modernising them as they went through the essay. It was really fun to do, and it felt creative to do that in a setting that I’m usually not artistically creative in. 

Feature Fridays, is a series led by Ananya Jain and Eleanor Milner, who are both artsoc committee members. The goal of the series is to share the stories and works of different artists and creatives in st.andrews, a town that despite its small size and population is thriving with creativity and individuals who are highly versatile and creative. If you think your creative journey is something that we should be sharing, write to us of facebook/Instagram and we’ll be in touch!