Richmond artist, Nils Westergard just announced he’s back in the city for the 2015 Richmond Mural Project
Richmond artist, Nils Westergard just announced he’s back in the city for the 2015 Richmond Mural Project after working in Blackpool, London, Graz, and Amsterdam for the past two weeks.
Yet, that’s really nothing new when he was already in Europe for some time during the past year working on festivals like Livin’ Streets Festival, Bratislava Street Art Festival, and Mobilní Architektonická Kancelář (MAK,).
His journey began when he started painting theatrical sets in middle school and was also inspired to do stencils by an older friend. All of this then lead to his graffiti work. Selftaught with some help from Stencil Revolution.com, Westergard said he just kind of starting doing it and it worked, telling Streetart Europe he “just followed a lot of shit on there and learnt it from there.”
But he still dedicated a lot of his time towards his schooling and in 2014 he graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a BFA in Film. Westergard even got some great recognition last year by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as a 2014 Fellowship Recipient.
A collection of Westergard’s work from a 2014 European tour with over 100,000 views on Imgur.
This street artists refers to himself as a “friend first, street artist, and film maker” in an interview with Isupportstreetart, saying “my friends are an enormous inspiration, and I stay listening to hip-hop, reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carl Sagan, and watching all sorts of films.”
Most of his work consists of a variety of portraits and he signs them off with a butterfly that “comes from a painting I did in high school that I started to re-use at a time in my life when things really started to come together.”
Westergard said that his style of art is in two different camps that use to have solid differences between studio and street, but that’s now more blended together; “I have the work I do which I dedicate to my friends, treating them in a way that is normally reserved for people of social or historical significance (or ads I guess.) And then I have my more political/social work, which is mostly about authority…”
He spoke more about it with Street Art Europe, “I started out using a lot of the political images with police and that. Two years ago I was tired of me being angry all the time. That is when I switched to painting pictures of people who I am close to. Now I kinda do both at the same time.”
Whether you’re looking at his portraiture or political work, Westergard strives to and is “very big on having art be accessible to the masses” but “there is more than meets the eye” according to Isupportstreetart.
He also says that the police scare him, especially in America.
Many street artists view higher authorities like the police as the bad guy in their journies because the “police in America can, and will, fuck you over hard…” said Westergard in an interview with Street Art USA.
“People do jail time for graffiti all the time in the states, that’s part of the game. In Europe, from my experience, the concept of doing time for murals or wheat-pastes is laughable- some places you can still get fucked for bombing, but even that is generally laughable. And when I say laughable I mean it, people literally laughed when I said you could easily do time for painting in the states.”
A Richmond Native, RVAMag has kept tabs on Westergard for a some time.
In 2013, he was involved in a project in the deserts of Arizona. One was a portrait of King Fowler, a Navajo code talker from World War II who passed away recently. He painted this mural on a building owned by Fowler’s nephew, Lorenzo. The other mural was a portrait of Calvin, a young resident of the Navajo community, who hung out and watched Westergard paint his portrait.
Check out a video of this project below:
Never losing that love of film, the street artist worked in the UK on a stop motion video which made the reddit rounds and for good reason – its fucking brilliant:
Westergards will be the first Richmond-native to be part of the Richmond Mural Project, and we’re pumped to see him paint 3436 Ellwood Avenue from July 9th to the 15th.
