Meet The Artist: Nathaniel J. Bice

Nathaniel Bice is one of our favorite instructors at ARCH. A prolific painter, model maker, and scenic designer, Nathaniel has been a prominent figure in the urban sketching and landscape painting scene in San Francisco for the last few years.

Hi Daniel! My name is Nathaniel or NJ Bice, and I’m an artist in San Francisco. I started off in live theater, and my career aspiration was to be a scenic designer. I started doing backstage theater when I was 13 in my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. I moved to Seattle and went to college at Cornish College of the Arts, in their Performance Production department, and trained in scenic design, scenic paint, props, set construction, and lighting. I also took an interior architecture class and there was a little bit of visual art fundamentals involved in some of my classes, but I’m not formally trained as a visual artist. 

In Seattle I started attending Urban Sketchers events (the Seattle chapter is actually the first, and now they are all over the world!), which was the beginning of painting and drawing cityscapes from life for me. I always considered it to be practice and research for my creative growth as a scenic designer. When I moved to San Francisco for a fellowship with American Conservatory Theater, I started drawing with the Sunset Sketchers, so that was the first neighborhood that I really got to know through sketching. I fell in love with The City and decided to stay after my fellowship, and I started working freelance in theaters all over the Bay Area. 

When the pandemic started, my career in theater came to an abrupt halt. I’m not a digitally oriented person, so I threw myself into drawing and painting from life out in the city. I needed something tangible. I started taking my art seriously for its own sake, instead of just being in service to my theater career. Slowly, I started showing in galleries and offering commissions, and now that’s my primary occupation, with a little theater on the side. In the last couple of years I’ve been bringing my experience in scenic paint back into play by doing murals! 

I find locations I am excited to paint around the city, and then I do thumbnail sketches to decide on my composition. Then I do a fast, rough pass on the entire painting before using thick gouache paint to finalize the piece. I often paint with friends so that we can learn from each other! 

The thing I love most is being out in the city and spending time just appreciating how beautiful this place is. I primarily make gouache paintings on panel, because I love the flexibility of gouache and the matte finish. I like how a painting on panel has such a strong sense of being an object, but there are practical reasons, too, like the ability to completely change the color of an area by wiping off the previous layers of paint, which you can’t do as well on paper.

I like cradled wood panels because they can be hung up without a frame and they look great. It’s a lot more investment up front versus paper, but a lot less in the long run when you consider the cost of framing. Also, you can always wash off a panel and start over completely when you are using gouache. I use both Winsor & Newton and Holbein artist gouaches, and most of my paintings are made with just a half inch flat brush. 

During the class, I take students through my entire painting process, from picking your subject, to thumbnails, block in, and final colors. On the way we discuss principles of composition, atmospheric perspective, and color theory. I’ve broken the process down into discrete parts so that the task of doing a whole painting becomes less overwhelming. I also take a little time to discuss some of my theories and philosophies around painting, like choosing something that you love and focusing on quantity over quality of paintings. 

The classes are small, so I am able to alter the focus to suit the specific needs of the students attending. I have designed the curriculum for people with some experience painting in other media who want to start painting in gouache, but during one class I had someone who had never painted before. He did a great job! It was amazing, because he was able to follow the steps with no preconceived ideas of how it should be done. On the other extreme, I had an award-winning plein air watercolor artist who tried gouache for the first time in my class, and then included a whole series of gouache paintings in her solo show just a couple of months later. Then she took the class a second time!

Absolutely! I am drawn to California painters, both of the past and contemporary artists, some of whom I have been lucky enough to meet and paint with. In the first category the top spot is Wayne Theibaud, specifically his cityscapes. Though they are imaginative, they are compiled from sketches done on site in San Francisco and I think that shows in the specificity of the work. 

As for contemporary artists, I have to credit Heather Ihn Martin for having a big hand in my journey with gouache, first following her work and then taking her still lifes in gouache class. I also love the work of Bruce Katz, Nate Ross, Kate Rado, Franklin Lei, and Kanna Aoki. I regularly paint with Mila Kirillova, Maura Carta, Karen Fiene (the watercolorist I mentioned earlier who took my class twice), and Cristina Kent, who are all amazing. 

I would love to do more murals. It’s such a great combination of my fine art and design skills with my experience in theater and scenic paint. I also love that it’s actually contributing to the creation of the city rather than just depicting it.

The main thing is just to do it every day, make a lot of stuff! The more stuff you make, the less afraid you will be of messing up, and the less self conscious and careful you will be. There will be ups and downs, and frankly no one is the best judge of their own work. I see so many beginners afraid to make a strong mark. Start with a really big, black marker and just scribble all over a page. I recommend doing something in a group, like Urban Sketchers, that gets you out regularly and helps make some of the decisions for you, like where to go. And the community will help keep you inspired and keep you going when people expect to see you there. Figure drawing is another great option, but there are groups for just about every creative pursuit! 

I have a lot of stuff going on right now!

I have a painting currently up at the Ferry Building, as part of a collaboration between them and Voss Gallery. I am working on a series of 50 paintings all from Fulton st along the North edge of Golden Gate Park, which will be part of this year’s 50/50 exhibition at Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica, opening September 6. In the middle of that project, I am also participating for the second time in the annual Frank Bette paint out on Alameda! You can come see the work of 40 amazing artists from that week at the South Shore Center on Saturday, August 3. 

The best way to keep up with my work is to sign up for my newsletter. Social media is unreliable and we need to be building our own networks so that we aren’t solely relying on them for our connections to the artists we admire. Sign up for a lot of artist newsletters, reading those beats scrolling! However, while it lasts, you can also follow me on Instagram @njbice. My website is njbice.com. 

Thanks so much, and I’m looking forward to the upcoming class!