Dixie at 210, 2004
Oil stick on paper, 30" x 22"

Portrait of the Artist, 2000
Marker on paper, 10" x 8"

The Artist's Lover, 2004
Oil stick on paper, 24" x 18"

Dixie in New York 2, 204
Oil stick on paper, 22" x 30"

Dixie in Her Bedroom, 2004
Oil stick onpaper, 16" x 16"

Nan Golub
The Last Forty

Anyone who has followed Nan Golub’s work for the last forty years knows she is a giant talent–evocative, versatile, and prolific.

Golub started studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute when she was 14 because her high school couldn’t adequately serve her amazing gift–she was a prodigy. At SFAI she had the opportunity to study with the big names who would influence her for the rest of her life: Nathan Olivera, Debrah Remington, and Richard Diebenkorn.

In 1963, at 19, Golub went to Mexico City to study at the Universidad de Las Americas. She was compared there to Roualt, Francis Bacon, and Rufino Tamayo. In fact, she apprenticed with Tamayo to study with the muralists of the Humanist style who were working in Mexico City in the sixties. Her deeply layered and darkly textured oils from those years evoke a smoldering tragedy and longing. Toby Joysmith, writing in Nieto Regalis in the mid-sixties, called Golub’s paintings “haunting and embryonically powerful.” Some of these fine works from her time in Mexico were shown in the states at the Maxwell and Lucien Labaudt galleries in the Bay Area.

In the seventies Golub painted less and focused more on art direction and illustration. Even here her work was recognized for its robust shapes and brave, often startling, use of color. Her illustrations, which could in themselves fill a gallery, were published by McGraw-Hill; Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich; Psychology Today; The Advocate; and The Saturday Review.

Golub moved to New York City in the eighties where she opened Green Dog Studios. Thankfully, for art lovers, she returned to painting and to the inner worlds she had only begun to explore in Mexico, this time turning her immense talent on the AIDS epidemic. Golub’s early New York paintings scream with the kind of agony and intensity that only a pandemic like AIDS can evoke. But they also come from her own unbearable experiences watching her friends in San Francisco and New York City die. “My Friends in Heaven,” an acrylic on paper, dangles the skeletal remains of five of these close friends in a black mesh of death somewhere between the abstract and the figurative. And her “Larry Kramer Screaming” bellows the outrage of not only Kramer, but all of us who watched the Reagan years blithely ignore AIDS.

More playful work appeared in the nineties. Golub painted the rows of deep red and blue Chelsea neighborhoods where she lives and explored a more hard edge style, perhaps coming from her years as an illustrator, in works like “The Taxi,” “The Empire Diner,” and “The Monster Girl” series. But the most important New York works are the masterful portraits of Dixie Beckham, Golub’s lover for twenty-five years. Golub has been keeping these extraordinary pieces to herself far too long, and it remains for an enterprising gallery owner to discover them and create an entire show around them. The dozens of acrylics, water colors, pen and inks, and oil stick drawings are a rich chronicle of their relationship, ranging from the early, obviously smitten renderings of new love to the images of long love–more painful, more daily, more deep.

Golub is finally beginning to get more attention, though not nearly enough. The AIR Gallery in Chelsea showed several of her pieces this year. And she has been included in two shows in 2004 at Leslie-Lohmann: “Allure” and “Marry Me.” In 2005 several paintings and her experimentation with three-dimensional work will be offered at Tercera Gallery in Los Gatos, California.

The late, Elaine Benson, who ran and owned the gallery bearing her name in Bridgehampton for thirty years, once wrote to Golub that her work is “moving and powerful.” Benson said Golub’s art “hits us where we live.” And so it does. Brava, Nan Golub. Brava. We want to see more.

Pam Walton is an award-winning independent filmmaker. Her documentaries are distributed by Filmakers Library, Wolfe Video, and New Day Films. They appear on PBS, Here!TV, and Netflix. Her latest, “Liberty: 3 Stories about Life & Death,” will be broadcast in 2005 on LOGO, MTV Networks’ historic new gay cable
channel.