Artist sketches a dream

San Diego Union-Tribune
June 04, 2001

Like many with huge hearts and strong allegiance to the divine concept of sharing our gifts, Kadir Nelson goes to schools and talks to kids.

He shares some of his life's story.

He began doing that two years ago as his ever-increasing number of new contacts in the field of education told him he could definitely help make a difference; definitely give youngsters a boost.

Nelson, 27, a Crawford High School and Pratt Institute graduate, now a consummate artist, doesn't roll off jaw-dropping accounts of drug and gang cultures gripping places where he grew up on both coasts.

Nor does he tell, in any dramatic tones, how a tall, wiry, basketball-playing loner held strong to the principle that "I'm not about trouble" and managed to escape, unscathed, from the bellies of the beasts.

He could draw "wows," however, just describing how it was in Atlantic City and here in Oak Park, where his divorced mom moved with him and three other siblings when he was 9.

Yet Nelson's story is compelling just because it reminds us: Stick to your dreams.

Through all manner of distractions, Nelson nurtured the art vision he's had almost from birth.

He's carried it through and transformed it into a rewarding reality that not only sustains him and his family, but also uplifts more than just his own soul.

With rich color, symmetry and sharp attention to details, Nelson's portraits and illustrations seem to jump off their medium. They grab you and make you want to examine them, get involved in them.

Nelson has been awarded prestigious gold and silver medals by the Society of Illustrators in New York. His commissioned portraits and murals adorn art galleries, museums and halls from Hollywood to Yokohama.

National publications such as The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated and The New York Times have featured his work. And he's lent his talent to movie projects, including "Amistad" for famed Hollywood producer/director Steven Spielberg.

What's more, Nelson has illustrated more than a half-dozen children's books, including "Salt in His Shoes," a best seller about Michael Jordan, written by Deloris and Roslyn Jordan, Michael's mother and sister.

Nelson's work seemed endowed with extraordinary power from the day that he picked up a pencil and, as he says, "just instinctively started drawing myself" at age 3.

He tells you that creating a piece -- any piece -- is a birth process into which he breathes the essence of himself -- every time.

"It's spiritual and healing," he says. "And that's what I always want to do with art -- heal people."

Nelson, however, could well have let others talk him off of art and illustration.

His mother, Emily-Diane Gunter, now a motivational speaker and author, displayed great promise as an artist in college, but let peers and instructors persuade her to follow a career in math.

Artists were always starving, but she'd have lasting financial security with a math-related career, the well-meaning folks would say.

Gunter remained ever haunted by what might have been. She didn't want the same for her second-oldest child. So she made certain to keep him connected to what was clearly a source of much self-fulfillment for him.

Nelson smiles at the memories.

"She always made sure that I had plenty of paper and pencils available to me," he says.

Still, when he entered Pratt in Brooklyn in 1992, it was on a scholarship for architecture and with relatives and family friends assuring that his financial security was in designing buildings, not painting pictures.

But during that first semester, after becoming almost envious of the sense of freedom that a friend had clearly derived through his work in the school's art program, Nelson became resolute.

He changed his course of study to illustration and declared that art would be his life.

Now when kids need it the most, he's strong living proof that through perseverance, dreams do come true.

Ozzie Roberts