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Meet A. Nigh Herndon, painter, musician, train tagger

The Tulsa Voice: So, how do I address you? A. Nigh? Mr. Herndon?

A. Nigh Herndon: No, you can just call me Aaron. When I was in college sometimes people would address me professionally as “Nigh”, and it always kind of catches me off guard. It’s kind of how I can tell if I really know somebody or not. I always hated the name Aaron, and A. Nigh Herndon always looked better, you know, as text. For some reason it just seems more professional.

TTV: It certainly lends an air of credibility.

ANH: Yeah, it’s like that old Ginsberg story where the poet says to a monk, “You know, nobody takes my poetry seriously because I don’t wear a suit.” And the monk says, “Well, wear a suit.”

TTV: There’s nothing about your art that seems “folkish” or self-taught. It appears to be the work of a confident hand. What’s your background as it pertains to art?

ANH: Most of my background is actually self-taught. I have a brother that is six years older than me and he pushed me into all forms of art, probably way earlier than I should have been. By the age of ten, he already had me reading great works of literature, beat poetry, listening to the Pixies. I grew up quick. I didn’t have a lot in common with my friends, so I hung out with an older crowd.

TTV: Your brother would let you hang around with him?

ANH: Oh yeah, I’m headed to his place after this. He’s still my best friend. I remember really early on, art books in my house. Not Renaissance type stuff. Books of [Clyfford] Still and [Robert] Motherwell. I remember Motherwell from a super early age. I remember trying to copy his “Circles” and his “Elegy to the Spanish Republic” and I had no idea why, but then my brother remembered that he had found a doodle of mine from elementary school and it was a beatnik, but he had airplane wings for arms. He made experimental films and then we got into experimental music when I must have been about eleven.

TTV: Like what?

ANH: Just weird sound recordings. We would record all of Thanksgiving Dinner, which nobody knew, and then we would go back and cut it all up and make these strange loops of sound and dialogue. Before all of that even, I can remember being influenced by comic books.

TTV: I can see that.

ANH: Yeah. Actually one of my favorite comic books that made a big impact on me as a kid was an issue of G.I. Joe, I believe the name of it was “Silent Attack”, and Lady Jane had been kidnapped Cobra Commander and Snake Eyes went in to rescue her, and he had to fight Storm Shadow. There wasn’t a single word in the entire comic. I thought it was amazing. I thought that should be considered on the same level as Bunuel or something.

TTV: Did you study art in college?

ANH: Yeah, I went to RSU, but I dropped out pretty quickly. Around that time my brother was working on this thing called the TriMurtic Manifesto, which his belief was taking all of the post-modernism out of art and taking it back to the spiritual side of art.

TTV: Yeah?

ANH: The TriMurtic was Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva and my brother thought that art should be created, destroyed and then preserved.

TTV: And you were on board?

ANH: Yeah, so I promptly dropped out of college and started painting full time. I was doing assemblage stuff, very much like Rauschenberg. I would burn paintings, cut them up, mix the ashes with more paint and create again - I really bought into the whole TriMurtic thing, and still do. And then life happened. I was showing as a twenty-one year old kid in Tulsa, I had some shows at colleges and various other gigs, and I almost had a Jay-Z moment where I was like, “I’m retiring. I don’t find this fun anymore.” So, I kinda quit and started up an electronic band.

TTV: Logical progression. What was the name of the band?

ANH: “Tank Battalion Attack”. I was working as a courier and I drove by a military installation and someone had taken a bed sheet and written tank battalion attack on it and I liked the sound of it.

TTV: Were you well received?

ANH: No. Nobody liked us at all. It was 2004 and nobody was into it, and it was really awful. I mean, it was recordings of murders and droning, it was very apocalyptic and “doom and gloom” type stuff. I think we might have been the first band to ever play the SoundPony.

TTV: Seems about right.

ANH: We released an album and it got picked up by Mexican record label. The guy thought that we were these prophets from Oklahoma. So abruptly after that, I was like, “I’m quitting music.” And I went back to work. So this whole time, I’m self-teaching, I move back in with my parents and I’m looking for a place to live, thinking about moving out of town, and I start doing graffiti on trains. My parents live out in Catoosa, about a mile away from the Oxley Nature Center and the train tracks out there. So, I would sneak out there at night, looking back on it, I could have painted by the headlights of my car and had the stereo on, but I thought I had to be sneaky.

TTV: So you tagged railroad cars?

ANH: Yeah, that’s when I started doing my new portraits. I would take a small amount of white paint on a roller and I would roll eight by ten sections on the trains. And then I would do the portraits. Sometimes they would be line drawings; sometimes I would use oil pastels. I loved what graffiti stands for, but I never signed anything. I mainly did it because I couldn’t afford surfaces at the time, so the trains were these great, free rusted surfaces I could use. After that, I quit messing around and I got married and started working. Made a good career out of it, but I was always tinkering with stuff. It’s part of my personality. I constantly have to be making something. I started getting back into modular music and I started making violins.

TTV: You started making violins?

ANH: Yeah. I try to make one violin a year. Sometimes, as you can see with my artwork, I’m very productive; sometimes I make three or four violins per year. My grandfather was a carpenter so woodworking has always been of interest to me.

TTV: So recently, you jumped ship, yeah?

ANH: Yeah, finally with the encouragement of my wife, she said, “You just need to do art. You’ve always wanted to do art. You don’t have to work this job. You just don’t have to do that. So get to it.” Recently I took my nephews out to Santa Fe on a treasure hunt. We didn’t find any treasure, but we went to the galleries on Canyon Road and I thought, “I can do this.” So I came back and quit my job that I’d had for eight years. I was a Sales Manager for a rubber manufacturing plant. [laughs] I think an artist who knows how to talk to people is a very valuable asset. My job was great. I had absolute security and I could have retired from this place.

TTV: You kind of did.

ANH: Yeah, I guess so. I just couldn’t die with regrets. I had to try to be a full-time artist. I’m a workaholic, so I would work all day, finish my commute and come home and paint all night and I was out of gas. I was just exhausted.

TTV: You ever have any second thoughts?

ANH: Oh yeah, like a few months ago, things weren’t really happening, nothing was selling. I thought, shit, should I go back and get my job?

TTV: So, in your current series I’m seeing three colors used: Red, white and black. What’s that about?

ANH: Well, it really goes back to the trinities: Creation, Destruction and preservation. Life, death, sex, you know, blood is red, birth is white and death is black. They’re powerful. They’re just the most powerful colors that a human being has access to. I’ve always been drawn to them. There is something about that color relationship that just works so well together. And I am using some greens, browns and blues for eyes in the portraits, but, yeah, everything else is, well, I only buy three colors of paint.

TTV: Some of the portraits have a separation and duplication of the eye, or of the subject’s mouth. Is that something you’re consciously doing?

ANH: I don’t think about it too much. I think an aspect of it owes itself to my love of surrealism. But I try not to produce outright surrealism because of the taboo associated with it.

TTV: Yeah, what’s that about? Dali?

ANH: Yeah, I think that people just react to the complete selling out that Dali did. You know, he wanted to be the Elvis of the art world, so I think the art community turned their backs on that. And in the late eighties, a lot of west coast surrealist pop art came into being and it was predicated mainly on shock value.

TTV: But Dali was a great manipulator of paint.

ANH: Yeah, he was. If you’ve never read his book—you should read it—in it he says the number one rule of genius is: “Be Salvador Dali.”

TTV:  There’s something to be said for that amount of self-assuredness, I suppose. How do you know when a painting is done?

ANH: I love a blank canvas. It’s about as perfect as you can get, really. So, usually I think a painting is done when it’s to the point where it’s just as good as it was when it was blank. I don’t want to overpaint. I like a lot of the texture still coming through. I try to leave it where I feel like I didn’t destroy the canvas, and it doesn’t always work. Every fourth painting I scrap.

TTV: To burn?

ANH: Yeah, I live in the country, so if they’re really bad, they’re to be burned. If they’re not too bad, I’ll repaint them white.