Nicholas Santore

A native of Philadelphia, Nicholas Santore has spent his career using pattern and bold color to evoke nostalgic architectures collaged from places both real and imagined. His use of corporate and abandoned building elements mixed with forced perspectives create dreamy landscapes that feel like memory. His piece, After the Gold Rush, reveals a pristine cerulean and cream balcony jutting and leaning in the foreground of a dilapidated, graffitied building. I sat down with Nicky to chat about his career as an artist, his design inspirations, and his newest endeavor - illustrating a book.
Words by Sarah Inocencio-Miller

Nicholas Santore

SIM: Your parents had a really large collection of Americana objects, and notably Windsor Chairs. Was it really cool to live in a place where there were so many beautiful objects around?

NS: I don’t think I was aware of it as a kid. It seemed normal and was just sort of the way it was. We figured out how to play around my parents’ collection and somehow we never broke anything. I have two girls and they’re always breaking stuff in our house, and I’m like, ‘how was it possible that between two boys and my sister, we never broke anything? But no, I don’t think we really had an awareness what we were around. I started to appreciate it more as an adult. My partner and I collect and are interested in antiques and vintage design, and have our own aesthetic.

The Santore Family

SIM: What’s your personal aesthetic?

NS: My Partner Valerie and I collect a range of eras and aren’t super specific, if it’s cool, and usually we agree on what’s cool, we try and get it. We both really love post-war French furniture. I got to keep some pieces from my parent’s collection. I tried to choose pieces that bridge our interests and what my parents collected. When it came time for us to choose pieces, it was really hard to choose, but I definitely wanted a chair, because my dad loved early American Windsor chairs – he had written two books on them. After all, we chose the one we thought had the most elegant stance and proportions. It’s interesting when you realize that those chairs all had different proportions and stances based on the maker, region, and era.

SIM: Do people sit on them or are they more pieces that you display?

NS: For my parents it would depend on the chair, some were off-limits, others weren’t as special and those were around the dining table and living room. I try to not have my kids around the chair I chose too much. I mean, the thing is like 250 years old, so it’s somewhat fragile. But South Philly row houses aren’t huge, and we have an ever-shifting space. One day there’s an electric piano in the living room and the next day, a trampoline. My partner Valerie sells vintage, and sometimes there are racks in the living room in preparation for a show. But ideally, the chair we chose deserves a place of prominence.

Charles and Olenka Santore with their collection of Windsor chairs

SIM: It sounds like you and your partner have a lot of experience in vintage. Do you have places in Philly you gravitate to?

NS: Before we had kids we used to go to far Northeast Philly and spend all day hitting every thrift spot. But those days are over, and now we love going to Retrospect because it’s already curated and vetted so we can take the kids there. We also go to Lambertville. Lambertville is across from New Hope. There’s a flea market there and a town with a bunch of antique and vintage shops.

SIM: How did you learn about assessing quality in vintage clothing and furniture?

NS: I think it’s from experience. My parents jointly curated their Americana and folk art collection, but my mom also had her own eclectic eye, and she taught me a lot, she had great taste. She would take us to flea markets as kids, and the Pier Shows in New York. I learned so much from my mom, she had amazing taste, amazing style- she was a Ford model in the 60’s. She was too cool.. Valerie and I both come from families of collectors.

SIM: Did she have a lot of clothes you and your siblings were able to look through?

Nicky's mother, Olenka Santore

NS: My mom always had great stuff, but over the years it was donated or given away. She was Ukrainian and her mother, my grandmother, would pack up old clothes to send it to our relatives in Ukraine. So all her old clothes – our concert shirts, skate shirts, surf shits – were sent there every few years. So very little of the cool, vintage stuff of hers was left. When all of that was being shipped out, it was still the Soviet era, so the clothes could only get sent through certain channels. There would be these convoys where the Ukrainian community in Philly would gather up parcels and ship them over in a container that would get through to friends and relatives.

SIM: Have you been able to visit Ukraine?

NS: I haven’t. My sister visits – she lives in Amsterdam. She’s very involved in what’s going on right now. She’s helping accept refugees in the Netherlands and has set up organizations. She’s been very involved with Ukraine since the war began.

SIM: Is your Ukrainian background an influence in your work? Are the Soviet-era buildings in your pieces real or imagined?

NS: ‘After the Gold Rush’ is imagined, and is a smashing together of various references. I was visiting my brother in LA, and we went to a cafe called Intelligentsia, and I saw the tiles on the ground there, and I was like, I like that tile. So I took a picture of it, and tried to figure out how to paint a balcony surface with it. That was the starting point of that painting. The structure in the distance is based on favelas in Brazil – they’re these abandoned apartment buildings that squatters live in and they’re just bombed with scrawls and writing and the windows are all smashed out. I wanted these two totally opposite elements to coexist. It’s also influenced by pre-renaissance painting, before a true system of vanishing point perspective had been invented, like paintings of Sienese School in the early 14th century. The architectural structures in those paintings don’t vanish to a single horizon line, and it creates a beautiful tension because it’s not right, but somehow it works. I try to force perspectives together a lot in my work in a similar way.

"After the Gold Rush", oil on linen, 2008, on display at Wim Cafe

SIM: In After the Gold Rush, the tile is a focal point. You have other pieces that prominently feature really unique tiles. Is that something in your own life that you collect?

NS: A big influence in my work is an artist named Gregory Gillespie. He spent of time in Italy and he painting these invented views but took architectural elements from different places and sort of collaged and forced them together,- like tile floors with patterned wallpaper, and interesting architectural details. Since grad school, i often try to use pattern in my paintings. Going into my first year of grad school, I was doing mostly representational painting, and then the program sort of shook figurative work out of me and got me looking at things in a different way. I started painting drop-ceiling views with fluorescent lights and making paintings of corporate architectural details because in New Haven there was so much of that. Once architecture got into my work, it never left. I’m interested in different eras of architecture layered on each other, and you certainly see it in South Philly all the time. You know, the houses that were built in the 20’s, and then in the 40’s they did a renovation and left some elements from the 20’s behind, and then from the 40’s to the 60’s more layers are applied, you end up with this mash up of architectural eras…I like forcing all of these things to coexist. I try to either invent or pick views that highlight those layers of architectural history.

SIM: Do you listen to any particular music when you’re painting?

NS: Right now I listen to Brian Jonestown Massacre a lot. I think they’re the best rock band around right now. I also listen to Wire, The Kinks and early Bowie, Bobby Lee. But yeah, Brian Jonestown Massacre is really good, especially some of the newer releases.

SIM: You and your father have very different art styles. How old were you when your dad illustrated Peter Rabbit?

NS: I was probably 13 when he did Peter Rabbit. He was still doing editorial stuff for magazines like TV Guide, Playboy, and Esquire when I was a kid. His children’s book stuff is the most well-known, but there’s so much good work of his from the 60’s and 70’s. Somehow my family and I have to figure out how to put together a book or a show – That work needs to be seen. There is so much of it. He was doing the editorial stuff so fast – like 3 jobs a week and just cranking it out. When he started making children’s books, he never went back to doing editorial work. The children’s book illustrations were definitely the most important and cherished part of his career to him.

A TV Guide cover illustrated by Charles Santore

SIM: I want to ask you about ‘The Scroobious Pip’. You and your father are working on this posthumous collaboration that I find really moving. ‘The Scroobious Pip’ is a poem that Edward Lear began but never finished, and was later completed after his death by Ogden Nash. I find your paralleled experience in working on this book beautiful. Can you speak to the process of finishing this book’s illustrations?

NS: It wasn’t anything I would have ever expected doing. Shortly after my father died, we were sitting in a meeting with a guy named Buz Teacher, who got him involved in his first children’s book. Buz and his brother owned a publishing company, Running Press in Philly, and they published my father’s first two Windsor Chair books. After that, they approached him to illustrate a version of Peter Rabbit for them. My father had never done a children’s book. This was the mid-80’s and he had done all editorial work up until that point. Shortly after my father died my siblings and I were sitting in a meeting with Buz to fill us in on where his project ‘The Scroobious Pip’ stood. My father only had three paintings done of the thirteen, and all these sketches. My sister pointed to me, and said “Nicky should do it”. He thought that was a great idea. I wasn’t even sure I was capable of doing it, so I started with just a sample. I’d never painted like that before, -animals in watercolor. One of the illustrations has 200 birds in one picture, it was intense. But I finished the sample, and the publisher and I agreed I would attempt to finish the book.

SIM: Did you find it easy to pick up his style?

NS: I wasn’t really thinking in terms of style. I had his drawings, but the drawings were redrawn by me several times to get them onto the paper to paint. I decided would just try to paint whatever I was looking at as best as I could – inch-by-inch, leaf-by-leaf. In art school you’re taught to work the painting up as a whole. But there was no possible way to do that. It was a very slow process, eventually it started coming together…Three years later, somehow, it as done. It was strange at first. I was sitting at my father’s drawing table in his studio with the paints he put out, and all his brushes. But I got used to it, and I finished it.

Nicky’s piece ‘After the Gold Rush’, featured in Wim Cafe, is available as a beautiful print for purchase at YOWIE [framed: $350, unframed: $100]. Each print is numbered and signed by Nicky. ‘The Scroobious Pip’ can be found in stores now and on Saturday, January 25th at 11 AM, Nicky will be at Headhouse Books for an event to celebrate its release.

Nicky was recently featured in The New York Times by Liz Moore.

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