NATHANIEL PRASKA

Nathaniel Praska started painting at the age of three with his grandmother who taught painting at the local community college. He couldn’t afford to go to art school so I found a painter in Bend by the name of Ken Roth who mentored his growth in art. First working en plein air, Nathaniel has participated any many juried shows across the country with his landscape work. In 2012 he received a grant from the Calligram Foundation which allowed him a great deal of time to work and study. During this time he he took a large step away from conventional representational painting and into iconographical depictions of familiar things, an excavator, dentures, the polaroid of a nude woman. His paintings are objects within objects, represented in sparing lines and grooves of think paint, in a monochromatic pallet with textures that absorb, rather than reflect light. Nathaniel has lives and works in Portland. He’s now 30 and still remembers his grandmother’s painting lessons fondly.