Nathan Apffel is an abstract painter. Between 2008 and 2015 he made eight series of paintings in a studio in Brooklyn, New York: urethane and oil pours, thin acrylic washes, and oil paintings built from hundreds of small repeated marks. He holds a BFA in Intermedia from the University of Hawaii. He now lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also works in photography, motion graphics and generative imagery.

Statement

I make abstract paintings on canvas: poured paint, thin layered washes, and fields of small repeated marks.

I make them to hold the moment just before an idea becomes a thought. There is a split second when a new realization is still a picture in the mind, before it has been sorted, named, or put into words. Intuition works in that second, outside awareness, producing images that seem to arrive from nowhere, and that is the part I want.

I work like a camera taking a long exposure of that moment. I set a process going, a pour, a wash, a run of repeated strokes, and let gravity, liquid, and repetition shape the image faster than I can plan it. Then I stop before I start explaining it to myself. Each series is a different way of taking that same exposure.

I want you to feel caught in that instant: something has clearly arrived, and it has not yet been named.

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