My name is Nick Glynn and I’m a 34-year-old artist from Milton, Ontario, Canada. I have been an active canvas painter and muralist for over 10 years and currently live and produce much of my work from my studio in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Throughout my career as a painter, I have created hundreds of pieces of artwork and developed a unique style of blending free hand painting with stencil design . My process involves creating layered concepts on Photoshop, and then printing and hand installing these images to the canvas or wall I am working with. I primarily use spray paint and acrylic wall paint as my medium of choice and my subject matter generally involves bold and colorful images, referencing aspects of nature, pop culture, technology and humankind. I like to think I employ a style mixture of pop art and graffiti street art, seeking to create images with clean lines and crisp color blending. One of the major benefits of using stencils in my paintings is that it allows me to mask off specific areas of a piece and blend spray paint color in a very sharp and specialized way.
YEAR ONE - 2014
In 2014 I was 23, living downtown Toronto and searching for a creative outlet in my life. I was looking for a way to express myself and had already tried my hand at music in my teens, and acting in my early 20s. Of course neither of these two ambitions were met with any true obsessive pursuit that is required to succeed in these type of artistic fields. So they quickly came in and out of my life, like any hobby that at first excites you, but then dissolves, as rejections and failure begin to emerge. In fact, I don't think at that time in my life I really knew what real passion looked like. To be totally obsessed with something that you would do it for no other reason then to create and fulfil some sort of inner satisfaction in yourself. Thankfully, for me, painting was there, patiently waiting, and I was ready to dive in head first when it came calling
Below is my first full year of painting. There were no boundaries or rules, no right or wrong way to do it. Today I put an emphasis on perfection, trying to make each piece as clean and devoid of mistakes as possible. I guess my style has evolved into that over the years, but these early works really demonstrate the freedom I was feeling when I first started. If you look at a Basquiat piece there's no debate where inspiration was coming from.
CHAPTER 2 - THE AUSSIE 10 - 2015
When I was 24 I moved to Melbourne Australia for a year. I made a goal for myself that I would complete 10 paintings while I was away on this adventure. I managed to finish my last piece just days before departing and this picture was taken on my final day, just hours before leaving my house in Brunswick.
I call this collection "The Aussie 10"
CHAPTER 3 - STENCILS, SPRAY PAINT, AND STARTING NEW
When I returned home from Australia in 2016 (after a three month pit stop in South East Asia) I arrived back with a focused mindset and a lot of new changes on the horizon. Before I had left, my brother Aiden and I had experimented with a few stencil spray paint pieces and I had a huge urge to pursue this style. Below are a handful of different paintings that were made sometime between 2016 and 2018. Pretty much all of these are spray-paint stencil works and it became a singular focus for my artwork once I started exploring this style and space.
CHAPTER 4 - FACES