A Mind for Art

An Ole Miss graduate makes it big as a painter with prolific artwork, from exhibits depicting his own family history to everyday city scenes.

Written by Eugene Stockstill  |  Photographed by Joe Worthem

Artist Noah Saterstrom seems to have painted himself into the wide-open world of international notoriety.

You may be aware of this already. You may have been to Nashville to see his current work on display at the Julia Martin Gallery. You may have gone to the Mississippi Museum of Art last year to see his sprawling work, “What Became of Dr. Smith?” You may have read The New York Times’ review of that show or read the book based on it. You may have been lucky — and quick — enough to purchase a piece of his work via Instagram in support of the Artist Support Pledge (see page 62 for more on that).

It seems fair to write that this son of Mississippi has created quite the life for himself. For his part, though, Saterstrom has very little interest in success. He can’t even remember the first painting he ever sold.

“I’m sure it was in college,” he said. “It didn’t make much of an impression on me to sell a painting. Sales have never felt like an accomplishment. More a necessary and unpleasant step to continuing to paint, but not of any value in itself.”

Born in Natchez, Saterstrom said his first memories of art are “the smell of Grumbacher acrylics that my father used when he would paint sometimes on the weekends (and) the peephole of my mother’s small China kiln when she painted ceramic tiles.” A big book full of Norman Rockwell prints inspired him, too.

“I did a lot of tracing of that book,” he said.

What was being a student at Ole Miss like for an aspiring artist?

“I did as little as I needed to in my classes so I could spend my time painting,” he said. “I spent a lot of time researching medieval pigments. But this was before the internet, so I had one old, tattered book and spent a lot of time walking around Oxford, finding things I could experiment with to make pigments. And painting. Oxford was very comfortable for me. Lots of good people and music.”

After graduating from Ole Miss, Saterstrom traveled to Scotland to study art, then found himself back in the United States, divorced and completely dislocated from himself.

“I became convinced not only that I did not exist, but I had never existed,” he told The New York Times. “I stopped painting, I went to therapy, and I breathed rhythmically. I tried everything to feel anything but a ghost.”

Painting old family scenes finally brought him out of his personal crisis and led him to create “What Became of Dr. Smith?” The work is so large that it fills up the walls of an entire room in an art gallery.

It depicts various scenes from his family’s past, including the life of his great-grandfather, a traveling optometrist who spent the last decades of his life in a mental institution and who became an uncomfortable family secret.

Saterstrom’s new artwork not only helped him to come to terms with his own past and his family’s, it touched a raw nerve in Mississippi’s past.

In 2012, a construction worker discovered multiple graves in an undeveloped part of the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. Exhumations began in late 2022 on what was once the site of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. As a result, The Asylum Project has drawn attention to a part of Mississippi’s history that most people would prefer to forget about.

And that’s one of the reasons that art is so important, Saterstrom said.

“What art can do,” Saterstrom has written, “is remind us that every moment is valuable, even the unbearable ones, and every moment is worthy of note, even the mundane ones. It is the accumulation of these extraordinary instances and ordinary days that make us human and give contour to our lives.”

You can find Saterstrom’s work on Instagram @noahsats and on his website, noahsaterstrom.com. The collection is an impressionistic goldmine of faces, landscapes and lovely moments in time.

Consider Saterstrom’s paintings of the New York subway system, which might not strike you as a particularly artistic topic. But for some, the subway is the most sublime of experiences.

“I went to the Met to see a show about Sienese painting and then took the N train to Brooklyn.  They are decommissioning those trains, and I really love those,” he said. “So I did some paintings. I tend to work from very haphazard quick snapshots sometimes. I love NYC. It is an undeniable force, like the ocean.”

Or what about the one titled “Assembling the Elephant”?

“It’s a found photo from the American Museum of Natural History, when they were making the elephant,” he said. “I love that museum, the dioramas.”

If you make it to Nashville, you can find his work at the Julia Martin Gallery there, too.

“She took a wonderful risk on my work when in 2018 I did a show there, ‘Shubuta and Other Stories,’ all about my Mississippi family’s relationship to slavery, which was extensive,” he said.

Saterstrom is currently working on illustrating a book. He supports the Artist Support Pledge, started during the pandemic to support up-and-coming artists financially. And of course, he keeps painting.

“At night I organize my images and thoughts and carve a path so the next day I can just go in and work. I work very quickly on many things at once,” he said. “It’s a long, long preparation for a few moments of innocence.”

#ArtistSupportPledge

The Artist Support Pledge was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic by Matthew Burrows, an artist in the United Kingdom. Here is how it works.

Artists post images of their work on social media to sell for no more than $220 a piece, not including shipping. Anyone can buy the work. Once an artist sells $1,100 worth of art this way, that artist agrees to buy another artist’s work.

“ASP works by example, showing how a generous culture behaves and exploring the values that maintain its ethos,” according to the website. “At the core of this is a commitment to equality of opportunity for all and an accessible platform to participate.

Noah Saterstrom is one of the artists who participates in ASP. “It’s a generous idea, open and honest and requires no middleman and spreads money around,” he said.

Here are a few tips on how artists can take part in ASP (from a video of Burrows on the website):

Post a work on your social media outlet with #artistsupportpledge. The hashtag will give artists access to each other’s work and a way to get in contact with each other.

If you post your work, make sure you post a good, clear image of the work.

Give full details about the work: Title, date, size, medium and price.

State clearly the ASP pledge and how it works.

Art collectors can also browse Instagram for #artistsupportpledge for the opportunity to purchase original artwork at a low price while supporting working artists .