Profile: The Organic Illustrations of Nicomi "Nix" Turner

				Oakland native Nicomi “Nix” Turner grew up on a ranch in Southern Oregon where, quite isolated as a child, her relationship with nature began. Today, at 25, this successful commercial artist also creates highly detailed graphic illustrations of the natural world. Inspired by the “perfection in nature” in her drawings, she makes an effort to disrupt and deconstruct that perfection by incorporating “chaos and things that don’t belong.” Although counterintuitive, it is not nature that brings chaos to her work, but rather the human figures that are represented, often with a counter-religious subtext. Nix creates her art “not for money or for fame,” however she is considering creating a book because, “they’re a good way to not feel that you could lose everything forever.”
	BEING AN ARTIST IS…?			…a flamboyant form of escapism.
	WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON?			I’m working on about six pieces simultaneously. I went through a period of internalizing all of the ideas I had in my head at the end of last year. It’s a really interesting thing that happens when you force yourself to live with a few ideas for an extended period. It’s like cabin fever.
	WHAT INSPIRES YOUR WORK?			The perfection in nature. Nothing can ever be made to be more seamlessly perfect than nature. I don’t want to just take a flower and a bug and draw it, I want to take that flower and throw in chaos and things that don’t belong. There is a great deal of symbolism in my pieces, but I leave the translation up to the viewer. It would be like giving up the ending of a book.
	OF WHAT PROJECT ARE YOU MOST PROUD?			I look at all of this as one big ongoing project. I’m not proud yet, just learning and experimenting.
	WHAT IS YOUR DREAM PROJECT?			Contributing to a cause is definitely something I feel is a duty of someone who has an audience who will listen. I am working on this right now and it has brought up some pretty interesting challenges.
	WHICH ARTISTS DO YOU MOST ADMIRE?			I have a great deal of respect for all artists (of any medium) who do what they do not for money or for fame, but simply because they would feel dead and incomplete without what they sing, paint, play, write, film, photograph.
	IF YOU COULD LIVE/WORK ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, WHERE WOULD IT BE?			If there was one place, it would be in some cabin tucked away in some forgotten village in Europe. There’s something enchanted and inspiring about places and things that are forgotten.
	WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST JOB?			I grew up on a ranch, which I guess was really child labor, but besides busing coffee, ranch work was my first non-art job that I actually put as much effort into as I do art. I was hired pretty much out of school to be a Senior Graphic Designer for a globally licensed company and worked up to Art Director. It was a lot of fun and I learned to push myself in different ways. I am now designing with an internal branding and communication firm here in San Francisco. My career has pretty much covered a wide spectrum of design and approach. I always wanted to be a biologist…I’m not actually sure what happened.
	WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?			Ideas usually start to swarm up before I go to bed. All of the things I want to accomplish—things I over-plan and over-think become this cacophony of noise.
				(Video tour of the ‘Midnight Mourning & Crooked Ways’ illustration)
				Visit Nicomi “Nix” Turner… www.nicominixturner.com www.nicominixturner.blogspot.com