 Nile in New York City, wearing his hand-painted hibiscus coat. Photos courtesy of Nile unless noted. The Nile Experience His work is what visitors notice when they enter my home. My own frantic, urban, abstract, wildly colourful paintings cover every wall surface from floor to ceiling, but it is this one quieter, realistic work by another artist that draws their attention first. Inside a Toronto subway, a dozen weary passengers commute to destination unknown, juggling parcels and attending to their phones. On the left, the figure of a young man stands serenely with hands in the pocket of a long beige car coat. His curly hair is pulled back into a ponytail, revealing an elegant profile and eyes downcast, waiting. The viewer is pulled right into the train by the painting’s perspective because it positions them standing inside of it, looking down the barrel of the subway car. It is framed like a smartphone photograph, straphanger and car floor lines naturally taking the eye from here to there, as if we are scanning for the possibility of a seat. We are people-watching in daily traffic. Of all the people on our train, the figure on the left is the one that stands out. There’s something about his patient, solemn assurance. He is compelling, and beautiful. When my guests get lost in the picture, I point at the figure of the youth and tell them he is the one who created the painting. They can already tell there is something special about him and that is why they are looking. I tell them more: how in some ways, this young man has restored my belief in humanity,
It is a statement that might make Nile uneasy. There is no trace in him of many artists’ stereotypical proneness to self-importance or pretention. Nothing contrived. His confidence exudes from pure curiosity about the world and a hunger to learn everything he can about it. He is, here, only eighteen, innocent, green as gold. He is charming, articulate, passionate. His affect is not at all self-conscious or reserved, but there is a kind of awkwardness about him. He is certain but also bewildered. He has no idea how he got here, really, but here he is. And he has work to do. In one’s journey to middle age, despair is a natural response to a litany of disappointments. At some point, the relief of jaded realism sets in as one accepts the facts of life, the complicated frailties of ourselves and our fellow travellers. Along the way, the banalities of existence and the petty cruelties of life lose some of their sting. If we are disenchanted by our own unrealistic expectations of others, we eventually come to terms with some of the pervasive superficiality, conformity, and disinterest around us. We accept some of the upsetting incongruities with the understanding that everyone is on their own journey, with dips and peaks. We learn to discern the jewels in the mire, the small sparks that keep our soul alive. We see deeper connections and people who follow their own offbeat path for what those moments really are: extraordinary. And sometimes we are fortunate to encounter the remarkable. Let me tell you the story of Nile.  His name is Nile, like the river in Egypt. His full name is out there but it doesn’t matter. He is Nile, the artist. He is a self-taught painter who has been creating and selling paintings of what he sees en plein air on the city streets for eight years, since his arrival in Canada from Sudan when he was twelve. He carries his work and art supplies with him on his bicycle, rain, snow, or shine, and sets up on busy street corners, in subway cars, in parks. He has developed his skills practically, working in traditional techniques of perspective, draughtsmanship, colour mixing, and brushwork. He has used trial and error, practice, Youtube tutorials, and most of all, the study of artwork by diverse painters through history to inform his understanding and application of art. He has also diverged into the exploration of other media: silversmithing and jewelry design; metal sculpture; and textile art, adding vivid tropical flowers and ancient Egyptian patterns onto his car coats. Nile set up at his first fair last year, the long-running Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, and there he was granted the first Charles Pachter Entrepreneurial Emerging Artist Award. His subway series was exhibited at The Koffler Centre, where he also performed live painting. This is his third year at OCADU, the Ontario College of Art and Design University, in my hometown of Toronto, where he started his studies at age 17. It is highly unusual for a young person to be an accomplished, award-winning professional painter before starting and finishing formal training and education. Even so, that is not what’s most interesting about Nile or his work. It is also rare to have his direction and determination as a child. But it is his free, unorthodox spirit and unique vision that truly set him apart. Nile refuses to be imprisoned in convention or in can’t. He can, and he’ll find a way. While Nile describes his home and family life as “normal,” he has been working on the streets for years because he loves being part of the living, breathing city and its diverse communities. Money is no object, either. He is not interested in the limitations of his student budget or his location. Nile rides his bike everywhere, taking his studio with him. And I do mean everywhere: Nile put his bike on a train, twice, to New York City, to paint there en plein air. And he rode his bike from Toronto to Montreal to Quebec City, and back, to visit art galleries all along the way. Then he rode his bicycle to Detroit, to Washington D.C., and to Baltimore, documenting his journey on Instagram and camping roadside and in parks. He traversed thousands of miles on his bicycle. He’s thinking next of Mexico City, or Ecuador. The icing on the cake is his latest project. He recently bought an old school bus, tore out all the seats himself, and has started renovating the thing to turn it into a roving studio. Nile will turn twenty on Christmas Day.  Nile after bicycling to Washington D.C. from Toronto. I first met Nile on the Go Train from St. Catharines after Thanksgiving weekend at my sister’s a year ago. He was wheeling his rickety bike laden with milk cartons and canvases into the train. I couldn’t believe that he was on his way home to Toronto from New York City. And I couldn’t believe that I had never run into him before. I’ve lived in Toronto for 35 years and never saw him painting in Kensington or beside the old St. Lawrence Market. I was struck right away by his awkward charm. He enunciated his words and held his head with careful dignity. He was radiantly beautiful with caramel skin and a profile like Nefertiti. His carriage was confident yet there was a shyness there, too, and his coat and slacks were baggy over his slender frame. I loved him immediately. We exchanged Instagrams. On the way home, I scrolled through his paintings and adventures. I saw him in his pork pie hat and an oversize suit in urban doorframes, or sitting straight-backed on a milk carton at his outdoor easel. I saw him in his pale suit with Matisse and Modigliani at the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo. And I saw his own paintings, accomplished, complex works full of the streets he roamed, crowds of people and heavy traffic, intricate depictions of storefront facades and urban architecture. He posted frequently to his social media and had an enthusiastic audience. He had his own website as well with his paintings and prints for sale. After that, I saw Nile everywhere. Coming out of the Art Gallery of Ontario, I saw him whipping past on his bicycle. My partner texted from an escalator at the Eaton Centre with a selfie. “Look who I ran into!” and there was Nile, balancing his inventory and his bicycle on the way up. I headed to St. Lawrence Market and there was a small crowd gathered around Nile watching him paint. I was on my way to buy olives and picked up a chicken sandwich for him, too. I ogled the silver and lapis ring swimming on his index finger. And I bought the canvas print of him on the subway commute and took it home and hung it in my foyer. It gave me immense joy each day to know that such a person was out there in the world. A person hungry and curious for the art that came before him, a person serious about doing the work and improving his craft and exploring the possibilities, not afraid to try and fail, and not afraid, either, of excellence. A person open to adventure and courageous enough to follow his own path. A person determined to live his own way and to refuse any obstacles. A person with fans galore, a person who loved connecting with people and a variety of communities, who was nevertheless, flying solo. Out of necessity: because there simply isn’t anyone else like him.  Selfie with Nile at St. Lawrence Market. Nile arrived in Canada from East Africa when he was twelve years old. When I visit him at OCADU on a Sunday afternoon, he tells me how he started selling water bottles on the streets of Toronto. Taking his earnings to Dollarama to get more supplies, he got lost in the aisles of crayons and markers. He was excited by the way the colours came alive for him and wanted to create from those materials. He bought his first paints in that aisle. His earliest painting was “a basic sunset” and he sold it at Dundas Square. There are early pictures of him precociously standing beside a bundle buggy with his paintings clipped along the front and sides of his cart, hawking his work to passersby. He loved the direct connection with the people of the city. He started painting street scenes live and loved talking with the crowds that gathered around him, feeding off of the excitement he generated. People enjoyed watching the process of a painting come to life as they went about their day, and he sold his work directly from his easel. The price was $25 for a small canvas, or $5 for a painted rock. An overturned bucket on Yonge and Dundas was a favourite perch, and another was the bustling St. Lawrence Market, where he still works regularly. By age 14, he had 30 thousand Instagram followers. He has since rebranded, and is building his social media again. The print that hangs in my hallway was originally painted on site, in a series of commute pictures that Nile created directly from the car of a subway. He set up his studio inside the train, capturing the people around him as he worked. In a video on Youtube from the series, he said, “I want to give people an experience, and see the process and be a part of it, because quite frankly, this painting represents them. They’re a part of it. I like to paint it, and paint it in the real spot.” He rode the subway loop from Finch Station to Union Station and up to Vaughan and back around eight times to create the work in the series. BlogTO picked up the story and it went viral. Nile switched to oil painting several years ago, discovering that the quality of blending and flexibility with longer drying times was superior for the kind of work he was doing. His paintings are complex and intricate and realistic: he paints what he sees, following the lines of horizons and architecture carefully, blending colours that match the city and the people that he captures. His intention was to continue his studies independently. But he often rode his bike around OCADU because of its proximity to the Art Gallery of Ontario, which he visited frequently in order to study the work of different artists. He was drawn to the university’s street front window of mannequins, and he watched students working on looms and machines inside. He wanted to explore textiles and create art that you could wear. He registered for school and started painting his trademark car coats with fabric paints. He dyed his worn beige one dark green, and on a visit to Allen Gardens, a greenhouse at Sherbourne and Gerrard, he studied and sketched tropical plants, including a purple hibiscus flower, which he screen-printed onto his coat and embellished by hand. He started growing monstera plants, envisioning an eventual studio space with living greens, and hand-painted the leaves onto another coat. Inspired by an ancient Egyptian statue, he worked on another coat for two months, using red dyes and creating intricate fan patterns and the monstera leaf motifs. These distinctive, one of a kind coats have become his trademark, suggesting a future as a fashion icon and utterly original artist.  I visit Nile in an empty room at OCADU, where he is working on a narrative painting from his experience camping on the industrial outskirts of Philadelphia. He rode his bike from Delaware, taking shelter in a small tent. He tells me about the urban loneliness he felt “biking past the Sunoco gas station, rows of dilapidated houses, a big, abandoned penitentiary.” He took in the surroundings, telling me how the late light reminded him of animated film stills from Tom and Jerry cartoons. “These scenes of alleyways and pipe stacks were like liminal spaces,” he explained. "They are spaces in transition. They are spaces that people are just passing through to get somewhere else." He shows me some of the animated stills on his phone, empty, deep purple worlds with dark angles and pipe stacks. I am reminded of the era of Precisionist art, real but surreal, inhabited only by industry, and show him some paintings by Charles Sheeler. He says, “I want to paint the places that look like they have been forgotten.” His work in progress is about how, in the dead of night, he was awakened by a freight train roaring past. He had assumed the train tracks were as abandoned as the rest of the area. The event was so unnerving that he packed up his camp and rode his bicycle to the airport to take shelter with people coming and going, drinking coffee under bright all-night lights. Nile wants to start painting more from these personal experiences and adventures, and I agree that this direction is an important one. Art sometimes depends on our stories, and Nile’s audience is tuned in because we care about those stories. We live vicariously through others, always interested in how other people experience the world and the things they feel. Few of us will travel with this level of immediacy and risk, and we want to know more about what it’s like. It's a Sunday, but when he’s not riding his bike to explore new places and visit museums, Nile works seven days a week. “I’m here from around noon and often until midnight every day,” he explains. If he’s not here, he’s in class, learning to weld or weave, or painting in Kensington Market, getting to know the people of the city while he works. I ask him if he gets lonely when he’s not on the streets. “Never,” he says. “I need space to just think. I listen to music, I work on sketches of what I see in my head, and I paint.” He takes me on a tour of the school. There are few other students at work today, but most of the shops are open just in case. We visit the spaces for metal work, photography, printing, and painting. We peel and eat oranges in a lounge where a few people are reading. Then Nile takes me to a corridor where his monstera plants are thriving in a sunny window. When his bus is ready, he will move them onto it. He likes to have living things around him. Nile wants to visit Vietnam, to see the wild jungles and ruins there, and the textiles. “I want to go to Mexico,” he says, where everything is ignited with colours and spices and millions and millions of people. I tell him I have been to Mexico City several times and that it is my favourite place on earth, so far. “Many artist do, but I don’t especially want to go to Paris,” he says. “The Louvre is full of artifacts from all over the world. I would rather go to the places they were taken from, and see them in their real settings.” He might take his bike one day all the way to Mexico City. He can’t wait until his bus is road-ready and filled with his paintings, and he can go anywhere. To Mexico, or out west, to see more of Canada. “I am free,” Nile says. “Art is liberation. People should be able to do anything they want to do, and live any way they want to live. There are no rules. Unless you are hurting someone else, there shouldn’t be any reason you can't do whatever it is you want to do.” He knows that most people live with restrictions, family or work obligations. But he also understands that most restrictions are just conventions, and the idea of what we can and can’t do is in our minds. Nile is unlimited. He'll have more money later, but he’s not waiting for that in order to live. He has travelled to a dozen cities just by peddling a bicycle from one mile to the next. He doesn’t even have to worry about museum entry fees. “I bought a membership to the Detroit gallery, which has a reciprocal entry plan, the most of any museum reciprocation cards. With that membership, I can visit hundreds of museums from Alaska to Panama.” He lives on fumes and trust, knowing that he’ll be able to sell some of the work he creates on his way to fuel the next meal. He doesn’t stay in motels because he has a tent, although he will book something with Airbnb if an area feels too dicey. He is also free because he loves his work. His work is his life and his life is his work. They are not separate. His journeys, his homework assignments, his hobbies, and his workday, all the labour he does for art exhibitions or fairs, all of his studies, all blend into one thing. Since the age of twelve, he has been creating his own life, working tirelessly to mold it the way he wants it, full of passion and intrigue and growth, shirking unnecessary constraints. He doesn’t see the why nots that limit most of us. Obstacles are imaginary. He learned that he is free just by actually doing the things he dreams of doing. He is his own green light. Nile really doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary about his innate sense of agency or the fact that he’s been working for himself and working on himself as a DIY project from the age of twelve. His outlook is exceedingly unique for 19, or ninety for that matter. Age is just a number, along with a lot of other imaginary boundaries. I ask him outright if he understands that he is special. And it seems that my assertion has made him uncomfortable, something I did not intend. I wear my big, messy, heart on my sleeve, and am prone to calling it like I see it. And Nile is a jewel among rhinestones. I don’t think he sees himself this way, as set apart, as much as being part of everyone and everything. He is as playful as a child and as articulate and sage as his professors. He is part of all the people he comes across, equally comfortable around sporty suburbanites, street people, artists, or professionals. From the beginning, he talks to me as if we are old friends. I do think Nile is special, though, and I reiterate my conviction. “You are an incredible talent,” I tell him. “You are gifted as an artist, an entrepreneur, a hardworking individual, and as a rare personality.” I tell him to give himself all the time he needs, and to keep doing what he is doing, as his ideas unfold. “You are going to be massive,” I declare. He thanks me, then deftly deflects the conversation away from my praise onto more neutral ground. Before our meeting, Nile looked over my artwork online and learned a bit about my background as a collage artist, arts educator, and editor of The Ekphrastic Review. Our work is not remotely similar; we are ages apart and have very different cultural backgrounds and lives. But perhaps we share an outlook; we are hungry to know everything about the world, to experience it from the inside out. We share a passion for all kinds of art, for wanting to know and understand what is behind the work an artist does and why they do it. We spend several hours chatting and wandering through the various workshops of the school, in preparation for this article. But the time comes to leave him to get on with his work of the day. Nile presents me with an envelope. There is a surprise inside, a loose sketch in pen and marker, of me. One of his recent experiments has been creating spontaneous, quick drawings of people on the spot, something he did recently through the festivities of the annual cultural event, Nuit Blanche. It is something I will frame and treasure. I feel an overwhelming affection and the desire to nurture and mentor this unusual and wonderful young man. But it’s been obvious to me from the start that it is the other way around: I have much to learn from Nile about becoming a great artist. Lorette C. Luzajic View and purchase Nile’s paintings or learn more about his work at his web site: https://artistnile.com Please support Nile’s roving studio project to transform a bus into a moveable workspace. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-convert-my-bus-into-a-moving-art-studio?attribution_id=sl:fa8f607a-34fb-49bf-b5db-839e0a3ffc09&utm_campaign=natman_sharesheet_dash&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link Follow Nile’s adventures on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artistnile/    Painting by Nile of Distillery District building.  Another painting by Nile from the subway series.  
 
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