Paint and Sculpt Till Oblivion: Egodead's Plot of Land

There's a story his family still tells. He was three or four, and his mother asked what he wanted to be.

"I wanna be a recycling man, like a garbage man," he told her, "because then I'll have access to infinite paper so that I could draw on."

He didn't know art was a job. Nobody had mentioned that part. What he'd worked out, at an age when most kids answer astronaut, was a supply chain.

"I was just looking for a means to an end in a way," Nishant Malhotra says now. "Just to paint, you know?"

Twenty-six years later, he's still solving for the same thing.

He was born and raised in the Bay Area, first generation, his parents having immigrated from India. He was also born a hemophiliac. His brother was on the soccer team and in karate, but Nishant's parents were protective, so he stayed inside a lot, reading and drawing.

Two images from those years organized his whole career, though it took him twenty years to notice.

The first was a Time magazine cover his parents had lying around, George Bush drawn as half an elephant and John Kerry as half a donkey. "I remember being like, wow, you can get a statement across with this image." He started making political work in middle school.

The second was the temples. He grew up Hindu and Buddhist, in and out of buildings covered in dense imagery encoding lore, physics, philosophy. As a kid he registered the beauty. Later he understood there was information in it.

His parents resisted the artist path for years, so he studied design instead, "that middle ground for them to comprehend that I could do some artwork that's within a working world." He landed a Google contract while still at San Francisco State, let it lapse after graduation, and moved to New York to sleep on his brother's couch.

He started painting on the roof. His brother's roommate was close to a restaurateur who also ran a gallery, and the guy saw a single canvas and offered him a solo show. Nishant had no money to fund it, so the same man put him to work in one of his restaurants, which paid for the studio where he made the work.

Three hundred people packed the street. He'd invited every cool person he knew and not one collector. He sold a single painting for nine hundred dollars while a canvas priced at ten thousand hung there unsold.

"It was just a very young, hungry way of throwing an exhibition," he says.

Design became the engine underneath everything after, and he hasn't had a job since 2019. He ghost-designed an entire store on La Brea, logo through every garment on the racks, his own paintings on the walls, plus merch and stage visuals for musicians who want art-level design rather than corporate. He calls it the legs of the operation.

Ask about his career and he'll stop you on the word.

"I hate to even use the word career, 'cause career ties it to money," he says. "It's more so purpose, life purpose." The test he offers is simple. "If I wasn't able to make money off this, I would be doing this thing regardless. If I was working at a grocery store, I'd be doing the same thing."

What he reaches for instead is Emerson. In Self-Reliance there's an idea that the universe hands each person a plot of land, and the work is farming what you were given.

"My plot of land happened to be drawing and painting," he says. "The fruits that are gonna grow from that tree are what they are."

Around eighteen he put it together, that a lifetime of compulsive drawing had been a sign the whole time. His meditation practice and his faith led him to double down, and the work stopped being about him.

"The practice doesn't become me drawing anymore," he says. "It becomes me serving." That's where the name came from. When the work pulls him out of himself, that's when it becomes infinitely fulfilling.

The temple craftsmen have a name, kaliyakaris, and they give whole lives to the form. In Vedic philosophy there's the idea of akashic records, knowledge held on another plane and reachable through craft. He knows how it sounds.

"I hate to be all kooky, but a lot of people share this experience, and I think what's real to you is what's real."

The method is the philosophy performed with a brush. He waits until he genuinely feels the urge, then lets paint fall on the canvas freely, without a plan. "My whole goal as practice is getting out of my own way while canvas is being painted upon." He stops when the design part of his brain registers balance, and steps back.

Then he looks at it until figures start showing up.

"I start to see figures emerging from the canvas, and then I'll simply just go in and outline the figures that I see." He calls it pareidolia, the reflex that finds faces in clouds. He isn't inventing the figures. He's spotting them. The technique is a practiced disappearance, and he compares learning it to meditation, "how to fall into that space between the spaces."

His materials are charcoal, oil pastel, oil stick, oil paint, acrylic. "They're like little soldiers," each with its own position. Charcoal gives him construction lines, because he wants "the history of the work behind the work" visible in the finished piece, the way Cy Twombly glorified the sketch.

The best trick is one he does wrong on purpose. Painters follow a rule called fat over lean so the surface doesn't crack. On certain works he inverts it, laying acrylic over oil, knowing that in fifty or a hundred years the oil will degrade, the acrylic will peel, and a different painting will surface underneath.

His new collection is called The Disease of More. Sixty-nine hand-drawn portraits, arriving August 18 with Transient. It's his first portraiture project and among the last of his figurative work, a bow tie on a story he's been telling for years about consumption.

"What is enough? Is there ever enough?" he asks. "With the disease of more, there is never enough." Everything, in his image for it, is an empty calorie. He wanted the pieces satirical rather than grim, and he wants people wearing them as profile pictures. He could have generated a thousand. He drew sixty-nine.

The titles are where he has the most fun. A Man With a Crippling Caffeine Addiction. Wearing the World Heavily. Stealing from Peter to Pay Paul. Productivity, with a question mark. A diptych split into The Camel and The Straw.

"The title is the bow tie on the painting," he says, the difference between handing someone an iPhone in a Ziploc bag and handing them the box.

Closing the figurative era opens the next. He's been building work for two years that almost nobody has seen, about the guiding hand, the muse, faith. His first childhood input was the political cartoon, and that era is ending. The second was the temple.

He's twenty-nine, and he'll tell you plainly he wants to be the artist who combines Virgil Abloh and Marcel Duchamp, a fine artist who also does the thing. He figures that comes after his thirties. Told the world might not wait, his answer got simpler.

"If that's the case, I'm just painting, bro. What the fuck are we talking about? I'm just gonna paint and sculpt into oblivion."

RKIVE CITY, one of a wave of Indian artisan designers he's been repping hard. Nothing they make comes off a roll of fabric. Every piece is built from vintage garments and old leathers.

Ceres in New York, the best pizza in the world, no qualifiers.

And the Chicago Man on the Internet Archive, who went to an enormous number of shows in the '60s and '70s, held a tape recorder up through every one, and uploaded the results. Among them is one of the earliest live Nirvana recordings. "It's the shit."