Natty Paint is the product of years of painting and fine arts training, combined with my interests in fashion and the music world. I started painting on clothing with puffy paints and spray paints in high school, and continued throughout college. The first official Natty Paint shirt was created in December 2008 as a Christmas gift for my roommate. It was a sweatshirt handpainted with puffy paints, based off a collage I had pasted together from various magazines and design books, and then projected onto the back of the sweatshirt.
During my free time in my spring semester senior year at Johns Hopkins, I learned the process of silkscreening in order to be able to produce many shirts in the same amount of time it took for me to handpaint one. My first silkscreened shirt was based on the MAGICHAT collage I had handpainted on my roommate’s sweatshirt. I next did the same with another handpainted shirt, TEA PARTY. I scanned my handpainted version onto the computer and used Illustrator and Photoshop to turn it into a black and white image suitable for silkscreening. Since then, I have been combining silkscreening with handpainting to achieve a unique wearable work of art, printing and painting all the shirts in my apartment. Sometimes I add rhinestones and sew bits of fabric into the image. Sources of inspiration include and are in no means limited to: electronic music, Peter Max, the 70s, 80s, Art Nouveau, Salvador Dalí, Klimt, Francis Bacon.
Many people have asked me what the name Natty Paint means. As I’m currently based in Baltimore, I felt I needed to somehow incorporate that aspect into the venture. National Bohemian, fondly nicknamed “Natty Boh” is a beer that is from
Baltimore, but also it just happens that “natty” means fashionable. The “paint” is a bit more obvious, since the designs are of fabric paint. The paint is plastic and water based, and once dry, is heat set into the fabric in order to ensure the design doesn’t fade or flake off.
My designs are bright and in your face. There’s nothing subtle about them. They’re meant to make a statement. An art statement.