arizona

Number 51 on the New Times “100 Creatives” list.
“Good work should always … have small isolated figures, fragmented heads, shadow play, words, flowers and small animals.”   Click here to read interview.

“Nelson’s work is at once urban and rustic, unsettling and folksy—reminiscent of San Francisco’s Mission School in the ’90s.” Rani Molla. Click here to read.

“His paintings, drawings, sculptures and video all prokoke a zany delight, thus leading the viewer into Nelson’s own paradoxically jokey view of the universe” Page 34. Click here to read.

(A Public Art Project by John Randall Nelson and Joe Willie Smith). Fabricated steel fences, gates, cast concrete posts and shade structures. Sited at Matthew Henson HOPE VI Housing Project, Phoenix, AZ. 2013. “Fifty-two sculptural finials with fifty-two unique concrete posts combine to effect jarringly comical juxtapositions of objects and form.  Spinning whirligigs and rustic weathervanes create an overall art garden environment that stands like a symbol of locality and remembrance.”   Click here to read.

“This Arizona artist’s mixed-media panels call to you from across a room with colorful forms and bold symbols. But when you draw closer, they whisper, with layers of texture and half-hidden words.” Seattle Times by Lynn Jacobson.   Click here to read.

Fresh Paint Gallery, Culver City, CA. November 2 through December 21, 2013. Featuring: John Randall Nelson and Raul De La Torre. Click to read.

“Like the meanings they invoke, Nelson’s works are layered. From a distance, their lively forms — rabbits, plants and coyote men suggestive of indigenous imagery — appear to mock the staid stick-people adorning pedestrian signs. Nelson’s works are anything but pedestrian, however. Approach closer, and additional words and images emerge from their near-burial in paint.”  By Nicholas Gerbis   Click here to read.

“unmatched in ethereal, scrappy dada, and the echoing jangles that were so strange yet magnetic.”
Click >here to read.

“Almost pictographic, they almost evoke the work of aboriginal, “primitive” or outsider artists, but they are also subtle, with faint traces of text and decorous patterns, things that might not make any literal sense but which play on subconscious associations.” Review by D. Eric Bookhardt.  Click to read.