LSD Snowfall: An Interview with Uman

Uman, Snowfall: winter in Roseboom #4, 2016–2020 (detail).

The Paris Review‘s Winter issue cover, Snowfall: winter in Roseboom #4, by the artist Uman, looks from different angles like a field of floating Christmas lights, a confetti drop on New Year’s Eve, and a winter storm touched with a kind of bright magic. Uman worked on it over a period of four years, dabbing bright color on the canvas until, as they told me in our conversation, it felt a bit like “the mothership.” Born in Somalia in 1980, they grew up in Kenya and moved to Denmark in their teens. In 2004, they came to New York, where they continued to work in collage, painting, and sculpture before moving upstate. They are largely self-taught, and their signature style is bright, geometric, and vivid. We talked about their economical attitude toward paint, the process of making Snowfall, and their sheep.

INTERVIEWER

Have you always thought of yourself as an artist?

UMAN

I certainly drew as a kid. The earliest drawings I remember doing were on my actual schoolbooks. At school I ended up drawing on desks and lots of walls, sort of like tagging things—always female figures. I wanted to study fashion. In Kenya our TV channels were limited, but we had CNN, and on Saturdays I would watch Style with Elsa Klensch. I just remember being fascinated by fashion—drawing things, making things out of my imagination. And it felt really good. At one point, my parents were called to my school to pay for the damages I’d caused. I realized then that drawing wasn’t something I should be doing, so I became more secretive about my creativity.

INTERVIEWER

How did your childhood and upbringing influence your art?

UMAN

I grew up in a Muslim culture. To this day, I talk to my dad and he says, “You know, you can do Islamic calligraphy.” And I say, “No, I’m a painter, Dad.” But he doesn’t get it. The place where I grew up, Mombasa, is right on the Indian Ocean. It was the very opposite of Somalia for me. It’s very, very culturally rich, but I wouldn’t say art is valued. It’s just there. One memory I have is of how beautiful the doors are. The mosques and old homes have these beautiful doors with carvings, and I was just fascinated by them. I didn’t go to any museums until later in my life. My first-ever understanding of art was when I moved to Europe and visited my aunt in Vienna. She took me to a museum then, when I was seventeen.

INTERVIEWER

Was coming to New York in your twenties a big cultural shift for you?

UMAN

I struggled a lot. I lived a very adventurous life when I first came to New York in 2004. I was young, I was having fun. I was always out meeting people, staying with friends and strangers, going to different boroughs. I used to sell my paintings in Union Square on the weekends sometimes.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have a studio?

UMAN

I found different places where I could paint. Then I met my friend Kenny, who had a space on Fourteenth Street. I bartered with him: I would give him a painting and he would let me store my work in a little attic that he had in his building. I would paint on the roof. Kenny’s building is three stories high, and there were construction workers working on the taller building next door, watching me below them. They would say, “How much do you want for that?” I sold a portrait of an elephant to one of the guys for twenty-five dollars. That’s the gist of what I used to do. I sold what I could to make money. I sort of had to invent and make myself into who I am today. I actually still have a mural in Kenny’s building.

One of the best things about being in New York, or living in New York, was meeting really good people who loved me and protected me and cared for me. I met this woman named Annatina Miescher who started a garden behind Bellevue Hospital, in a space that used to be a parking lot, right by the FDR. That garden still exists. I would go there and work with her, and the hospital gave me a stipend—twenty bucks, sometimes forty bucks. We made mosaics and we turned this parking lot into this beautiful garden. I planted a wisteria tree that’s really tall now.

Annatina was always a champion of my art. She was connected in the art world and had this idea that if Matthew Higgs saw my work, something could happen. And when he did, he gave me a show. In the summer of 2015, he said, “We are going to do a September show.” That’s how my career started.

INTERVIEWER

What’s your studio like now?

UMAN

It’s very hard for people to get to my house in Roseboom. It’s on a seasonal road, it’s on top of a mountain, and it’s always cold, it always snows. It’s the most beautiful scene but I haven’t been able to get people to come to studio visits there, which is very frustrating, so in late 2020 I got a separate studio in Albany. That’s where I work now. It’s an hour and a half from my actual home, but I set myself up so I can sleep here. After my call with you, I’m going to drive home to Roseboom and be there for the next two days and then come back to the studio on Wednesday.

INTERVIEWER

Do you like living upstate? Do you have any animals?

UMAN

Oh my goodness. I have a long history with animals. I had sheep at one point. I had to give up my sheep after one winter because it was so tough—I realized I couldn’t take care of them. I’d lost one of my sheep, and it was the most painful thing to deal with because they’re almost 150 pounds. It was really traumatizing. I realized it was going to be too difficult for me to raise them and also have a painting career. It’s a lot of work. I have chickens right now. I don’t know exactly which chicken is which—I stopped naming them after losing a few—but I know that I have this love for them.

INTERVIEWER

Do you paint every day?

UMAN

I work every day in some fashion: manifesting, cutting things, sewing, collecting. Sometimes I sit around and stare at these paintings. I work a lot, but not in the way you would think. I don’t stand on my feet painting for eight hours. It’s a very slow, very gradual process.

INTERVIEWER

Do you go through a lot of paint?

UMAN

I’m very, very economical. I was going to say cheap, but no, I’m not cheap. I’m just very stingy. There are oil paints in my studio that I’ve had for over ten years. I squeeze out just a little bit of paint at a time. If you go to some other artists’ studios, you will notice that the floor is covered in paint. My place looks like a lab. I don’t like wasting paint, and I don’t like having a messy studio.

INTERVIEWER

How many paintbrushes do you have?

UMAN

I’m not very attached to my paintbrushes. I know people who have kept brushes for years. At one point, I would use a brush for just a month before switching to a new one. In fact, Annatina used to tell me, “You always waste brushes.” I use a brush to the end of its life, but I go through them quickly.

INTERVIEWER

Your practice includes sculptures, collages, drawings, and found objects, but now you mostly paint. Is it the medium you’re most drawn to?

UMAN

Painting, to me, is like playing music for a conductor. It just feels natural. It’s something I can control.

I eventually want to go back to collage. I just got bored with it. I believe I did certain collages really, really well, to the point where I feel like a lot of people imitated me. Many, many artists are appropriators of self-taught artists. They come and see something, and they use it to their advantage. I want to tell them, Please go out there and make something original. You have to push yourself and make honest work, not work that tries to look like somebody else’s work. That’s my biggest pet peeve: people who have no originality and take things from artists who are marginalized—outsider artists—and end up gaining something from it.

INTERVIEWER

What was the process of making Snowfall like? You worked on it for a long time, right?

UMAN

Yes, but not continuously. First I started stretching the canvas, then I prepared it. It’s a really big one—ten feet long. It sat in my studio and I worked on it for several years. Each little color in it was left over from another painting I did. At first I painted just pure snow—white dots all over. And then I said, Let me just add colors to it. It became like an LSD snowfall. It would sit in the corner while I was painting three or four other paintings, and I would go back and forth between them. For a few years I would touch Snowfall with whatever little color I had that I thought made sense. I’m very instinctual, so I don’t know—something about it just drew me back. At some point, I thought, This is done.

INTERVIEWER

Snowfall influenced the painter Matthew Wong, who died in October 2019.

UMAN

Matthew was such a great painter. One day he sent me a message on social media and that was the beginning of our friendship. He came to me and said that he loved my work. Meeting him left me euphoric, left me confident. It changed me. It felt very invigorating and validating to hear that from another artist. And we shared ideas—I sent him images of what I was working on, and he sent me images of what he was working on. He was very encouraging, very supportive. I really, really wish he were here.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think Snowfall is different from your other work?

UMAN

It’s a mixture of realism and abstraction, because in a sense it’s really that view I have in Roseboom. Just hills and hills, and then sitting on top of the hill where my house is, you can see these valleys and they’re part of what’s called Cherry Valley. This painting inspired a lot of paintings I did after it. It’s sort of like the mothership.

Camille Jacobson is the engagement editor at The Paris Review.