When asked why he became an artist, Nick Canterucci laughs. “Well, about that,” he says, “I wanted to meet girls. When I was a young guy, up in [Detroit,] Michigan, there was this beatnik artist who lived next door to us and he always seemed to have some kind of bitching babe on his arm. He smoked unfiltered Camels, wore a beret, and had a cool little sports car. I thought, man, this is right up my alley.”
Despite his ambitions, Canterucci never had any formal art training, going to school for mathematics and later moving from Detroit to Memphis to work at Channel 5 and with FedEx. Yet, throughout his career, he stuck with his art, finding that his passion for creating drove him more than wooing the ladies ever did. “My wife would say, ‘You’re a good boy now,’” he says, before quipping, “But I’m wilder and busier than I’ve ever been. I just haven’t gotten the email that I’m old. My brain is 25 and my body’s 70.” And the amount of work he has produced over the past few years since retirement would agree. In fact, even though his 18th show is currently on display at the Medicine Factory, he is already halfway through creating his next show, slated for 2024.
For now, Canterucci speaks of his current exhibition “When Arrows Meet,” which consists of paintings done in his “outsider art” style. With bold colors and collage elements, the 20 abstract pieces demand the viewer examine every inch of the canvas, with the eye drawn to each individual element — from a set of numbers floating in the background to a tiny British flag pasted on a breast. The compositions are purposely chaotic, with one piece even titled Cacophony, leaving observers to decipher patterns for themselves, as if Canterucci has left behind a code without a key — and that’s not far from Canterucci’s method.
He says, “There’s a lot of secret information in my paintings. If you know how to translate my visual parameters, I’m telling you exactly everything that’s going on in my life or my friend’s life or my wife’s life.” For some of his pieces, Canterucci cites the exact moment of inspiration — a friend expressing feelings of isolation, a friend’s break-up, or the opening credits of a movie he fell asleep while watching. Painting, he explains, allows him to process his experiences, mundane and extraordinary alike.
As he created the pieces for this show, Covid was at the forefront of his mind. “I feel sensitive, and there was a lot of weird energy in the air sometimes, and I can’t explain it. I can’t tell you exactly what it is, but sometimes, it kind of makes your hand stand up, and so I’ll work through it by painting.” That sense of urgency to get his thoughts onto the canvas, in turn, reveals itself in enthusiastic, stark brush strokes and self-assured outlines of figures, with little need for perfection.
Canterucci embraces abstraction, finding solace in the “offbeat” German and Russian artists of the 1920s and 1930s who existed outside the mainstream. He himself has often felt like an outsider, understanding the world differently than those around him. “I see the world in ones and zeros. Kind of like the Matrix,” he says. “I just have a stream of numbers. I see everything in mathematical sequences and stuff.”
Abstraction, the artist continues, “appeals to the mathematical thing in my brain, and it allows me to work through issues. … Art can be very therapeutic at times. It can really help you get over some issues. Same thing with music. I can’t tell you how many cool records got me out of Pity City. So it goes both directions [between the artist and the consumer].”
As such, Canterucci hopes his paintings can stir something within his audience. “Maybe it helps them take stock of where they’re at in their life, or maybe I can bring a smile to their face, or maybe, they can go, ‘Oh God, this is terrible,’ and give them something to talk about.”
No matter the response, Canterucci thrives on feedback and often seeks knowledge and inspiration from other artists to improve his craft. “Each show seems to be a little bit better. You could obviously see an evolution of progress from my early shows up to this one, which is my 18th,” he says. “And then again, for every successful painting I’ve had multiple failures. Sometimes what you see in your head and what ends up in the canvas are two different things. And then you have those rare occurrences where you’re firing on all cylinders. And then boom, bingo, you nailed it.”
In the meantime, between being in his punk band The Underwear Heads and making his fanzine, Canterucci shows no sign of stopping painting. And when he’s painting, nothing can stop him. “ I don’t care if the house is on fire,” he says. “I don’t care if giant bat spiders from Jupiter are coming down the street grabbing people. Don’t bother me.”
The last day to see “When Arrows Meet” at the Medicine Factory is Saturday, February 18th.