Over the course of 2023 and int o 2024

We have had some great opportunities to pursue art in yet another form. Through furniture design and build we are creating heirlooms from relics. There is a certain responsibility and artistic challenge to using what is available. In these worn out and abandoned parts and pieces we have found life. There is an abundance of abandoned in the world and no less of it where we call home. What a treat to envision a new life for these discarded and forgotten signs of the past.

Nathaniel Franklin

Nathaniel Franklin has spent much of his life finding beauty in the abandoned. 

A man born-again to the atlas; from cityscape to desolate desert, to staggering peaks of the Rocky Mountains, into the colossal trees of the west, across the dramatic San Juan mountain range. 

Rusty metal wrapped around old engines chipping away at yesterday. His work embodies the gears and levers of lives that lacked our modern comforts and can be faintly recalled in overgrown wagon wheel tracks. 

Prairie Punk has been built on the back of the wind- 

what we endure for the sunsets.

Nathaniel is a husband and father, musician, designer, creator, traveler, photographer, and an extreme optimist. A seeker of skills, a lover of learning.

Paint and patina. 

Here is a piece that I wrote several years ago for a show. It still reflects my feelings towards my work as an artist and a place I once called home.

Facing West

By Nathaniel Franklin

Facing West is my contemporary look at our western past. Living in this part of the world, we can’t help but notice the remnants of lives lived and times spent -- times spare and hard. Times when all were accountable. One tried hard or perished, pure determination often the sole factor in determining success or failure. There is much to learn from those simple times. Human character settled this country; we should remember.

These remnants are not signs of mass production but pieces hand-carved and hand-forged with drawknife and hammer, fire and steel. These craftsmen would heat and hammer and whittle until at last something emerged: a wagon, a plow, or a piece that had no name but was necessary. These pieces tell stories. A buggy parked one day, never to serve again. A plow that gave hope, now abandoned. They are melting back into the earth from which they came. What stories they tell. 

These pieces are unearthed, cleaned, polished and showcased. They are not my work but that of skilled hands from times past, a showcase of skills lost to industrialization, lost to faster times, forgotten due to lack of necessity. Blades of a windmill, a simple contraption that changed the world: what would the West be without it? In our fast and complicated times, I think the windmill’s simplicity is worth noting. 

From my home I am blessed to face west and watch the sun set each evening. My paintings, though not “representational”, are skyscapes or other colors that are present in my life here -- the elements that are so constant and cannot be ignored. Elements that are life here, facing west.