Today we’d like to introduce you to Nina Modelski.
Hi Nina, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
It’s not something that I necessarily regret, but I took a really long and winding path to being an artist. Way back when I was still a starry-eyed youth (in the mid 2000’s), I didn’t think I could make any kind of career out of art, I thought it was much more prudent to be some sort of academic. I was just graduating from high school and I had enrolled in University of South Alabama really only because there wasn’t anything else to do. I spent my listless early 20s pursuing all of my other interests, switching majors every other month, and trying to earn enough money to live by selling my plasma. Eventually, I decided that it was a waste of time and resources to keep going to school, and I moved to full time work. It only took about two years of that before it felt like the drudgery would kill me. At the time I was making good money working at a call center, setting up payment plans for people’s past due cell phone bills. The work culture was toxic as hell, the customers were always angry, but it paid the bills with enough left over for some little luxuries. I really could have just stalled out there, I didn’t like my job but I was comfortable. The whole time I was still making art, drawing and painting and dreaming, but it got boring. I was creating the same escapist fantasies over and over, only reflecting the media I’d been consuming to soothe myself. It’d be great if this was the point where I said that I did some self reflection and brought art to the forefront of my life as a worthy pursuit but I didn’t. I was 25 and bored out of my skull. I decided the only way to stay sane would be to do something crazy. So I joined the Military. I spent just shy of 8 years in the U.S. Navy. I learned a lot of interesting things, I got to travel to a couple of cool places, but somehow my rate (Cryptologic Technician Interpretive) landed me in what essentially boiled down to a high stakes desk job. I was very good at my job though, and I took a lot more pride in what I was doing than the working at the call center, so that probably had something to do with why I reenlisted that first time. While I was in the Navy, it was funny but people who could draw always got trotted out like pets that could do a particularly fun trick. I was surprised by how many people there were too. A little contingent of us that they could call on to design logos and spruce up presentations. It was still a little soul crushing though. I really tried to stick it out but the toxic office politics and various other more national politics made me realize retirement benefits weren’t going to be worth another 8 years of increasingly petty bull shit. That was 2020, the start of the COVID outbreak and despite all the extra hurdles that added to the process I left the Navy and moved to Wales to get my bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at the University of Aberystwyth (a·br·is·twuhth). I picked Wales for the scenery, and man it was worth it just for that, but my University was also really amazing. My classmates were mostly much younger than me but they were incredibly welcoming, and the teaching team! I had never had the chance to spend a whole “work day” just painting like that before. As much as I loved painting I had decided that I lacked a certain je ne said quoi to hack it as a fine artist and I shifted my focus to Illustration in the last year. The practicality of it made me feel a little more grounded, a little less like I was screaming into the void. When I got back to the states, I was a little lost on how to keep doing that and not starve to death. Not to mention going from a group studio to a little home studio (my bedroom) made the process feel incredibly lonely. I applied to Maryland Institute College of Art for a Masters in Illustration, hoping to get a little bit of the feeling of comradery back. That pretty much brings us to now, where the possibilities have once again become intimidatingly infinite.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The biggest obstacle for me was and still is my attitude towards myself. I have a terrible habit of assuming I lack the credentials to be taken seriously. There were and are of course other problems, the mundane and demoralizing problems of earning money, the ubiquitous and causal dismissal of the value of artists, the rise of generative AI, personal upheavals, and so on, but by and large the thing that has stymied me the most has been a persistent belief that I am just not good enough to call myself a real artist. Even now there’s a subtle undercurrent in my thoughts insisting that nobody is going to care about this, there are better and more interesting people to talk to. It takes a tremendous amount of effort for me to do any kind of self promotion. More often than not I fail pretty spectacularly at it. I’m lucky to have an incredibly supportive family, they keep me on the right track as much as they can and remind me not to tell myself no before anyone else can.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Hahaha what a tough question! My mind goes immediately unhelpfully blank, like I’ve never done anything before in my whole entire life.
Right, well, I consider myself an illustrator and a surrealist. I think the surrealism is a by product of my process which doesn’t use a lot of references (even when it should). It gives every thing a dreamy slightly wrong feeling that I like. I really enjoy that vibe, a little bit creepy and unreal. It doesn’t always work but for me, some much of creating is about dragging something imagined into reality. As long as it exists its okay if it isn’t super realistic.
I’m not married to any particular medium, but the work I’m post proud of is probably my pen and ink drawings, if only because I’m always surprised I had the patience to finish them.
The thing that sets me apart, ah I’ll quote some feedback I got from my Life Studies teacher. “You have the ability to sustain your focus – and keep at it, when others around you wilt. It is this doggedness and focus that allows the drawings to keep reanimating – sometimes drawings hit a wall and it’s hard to know where to take them. Most of us surrender at this point, but you seem to push through this, and allow mini-Renaissances to occur, accumulating incrementally to make some of these excellent pieces.” That really stuck with me. I don’t have to be good, just stubborn! Though it’s my experience that anybody trying to make art work as a career is at least a little stubborn.
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
Curiosity! Hands down, I think it is one of the most important qualities for humans in general, but to succeed you’ve got to be curious! You’ve got to be able to wonder if there is a way to make things work, or make things better. You’ve to got to want to understand the world around you and/or inside you, to learn new things and keep growing, otherwise stagnation is inevitable.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.curiouscatbazaar.com/
- Other: https://bsky.app/profile/nina-modelski.bsky.social
