OUT OF FRAME: August Northcut Sees Tectonics in the Sky
“Love alters the physics around you in some way: changing the speed of light and the shape of space and how you experience time.”
As long as I’ve known August Northcut, he has had the letters “RDT” floating around obscure spots in his artwork and added to the end of his given name as if it were a designation of lineage. It stands for “random dream tectonictry.” All spelled out, it serves for his artist moniker on Instagram and to be candid, I have spent years having no idea what it meant.
August Northcut sharing sketchbooks and gin. Shot on Ilford HP5 Plus, September 2021
“I thought I would be an actor, actually.”
Not too long ago, I found out that August and I went to middle school together. It was only for one year and he went by his first name, William, at the time. I would have never known if we hadn’t been caught up in one of those summer evening backyard conversations that somehow leads everyone into a shared session of recalling how truly awkward and painful youth can be. Sure enough, I went home and opened a yearbook to find his mess of brown hair and instantly recognizable eyes staring back at me. I wondered if we had ever sat near each other at an assembly or in the lunchroom.
Before that night, I was under the impression that August spent his whole childhood in Charleston, SC and moved to Kentucky after college to try something new because his family was from here...and that is still mostly true. That conversation ended up dispelling another misconception I had about August. He didn’t go to art school for art. At least, not at first.
As we wound our way down the history of his life, he told me he majored in theater originally. The first play we talked about was ‘Rabbit Hole’ by David Lindsay-Abair. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2007 and served as the source script for 17-year-old August Northcut’s acting audition for The Savannah College of Art and Design. He got in, got acclimated to yet another humid and historic Southern city and realized he didn’t want the rest of his life to be dedicated to studying scripts.
So, what now? Time to frantically soul search and dredge up another skillset. Time to identify another passion to offer up on the sacrificial altar of capitalism. Time to start taking your sketchbooks more seriously.
Graffiti, Gin and Going Home Again
When August ended up back in Louisville after school, he was certain it would be temporary. I remember when he started appearing on the periphery of my creative circles. He curated art shows and painted the outdoor signage at former Butchertown bar Louis’ the Ton, designed posters for some of my friends’ bands, and quietly filled out conversation circles I found myself in over the years.
Some of those creative circles eventually led to this very outlet, a media company we built from the double-edged sword of creative frustration and open communication. It was also those conversations that convinced August to stay a little longer and see how things played out.
By the time August started really making a go at being a freelance artist in Louisville, he had grown out of the youthful adrenaline days of graffiti culture, though you could still see the traces of that time is his repertoire of diverse lettering capabilities. A lot of the landscapes depicted throughout August’s portfolio also hint towards a nostalgia for slipping into abandoned buildings under the cover of night or finding a secret spot near a railyard to watch the graffiti from god-knows-where roll into town on the walls of cargo cars. Even his ink drawings on white paper always feel like nighttime to me.
August Northcut shot on Ilford HP5 Plus, September 2021
Talking all of this through with August over a gin and tonic (or 3) in preparation for writing about him, I realized something. I didn’t plan to ask August about any other artists he was influenced by. It’s a fairly standard talking point in artist profiles but I was a bit stunned to find that I hadn’t even considered it. Then, it hit me all at once. I’ve never looked at August’s art like something static. It shifts so frequently, even page by page in his sketchbooks, it feels more like the tectonic plates of a dream crashing together to form something surreal that somehow feels more tangible in his hands.
Random Dream Tectonictry
It was this realization that finally gave me the gumption needed to look my friend in his eyes and finally ask him where the hell he came up with his artist handle. Tectonictry is not a real word, I only knew tectonics in the context of my earth science class at the private Christian middle school August and I unknowingly suffered together and it’s so hard to spell that I’ve had to double check my spelling for this article a maddening number of times.
He laughed and told me that it came from a play he had seen back in Charleston called ‘Cloud Tectonics’ by José Rivera. It’s a love story that plays out like the liminal space between science and dreams. The quote that started this story came from that play. It reads like poetry but could easily be a succinct way to sum up Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Modificate / Sum Phantosy / Selkie Revenant by August Northcut, 2014
Music works the same way, if you think about it. It’s a deeply mathematical exercise that results in art rather than integers. August filled in that blank before I could even get to it and told me that music moves him to pick up a pen for his own passions more than anything else. I asked him what kind of music hit him hard like that, knowing full well that it was an obnoxious and nearly impossible question to answer. We ordered another round of drinks and extended our conversation indefinitely to define what he calls “Green Music.” It’s another signifier that August has to fall somewhere on the synesthesia scale, music from disparate genres and decades that all feel green to him. And again, not that they make him see the color green, but they feel green like humid backyard conversations or bluegrass after the rain.
Our conversation ended where it had really started years ago by talking about how we found ourselves sitting across a table from each other time and time again in different scenarios but always in supporting roles of each other. My dad was an artist from Kentucky. My dad was an avid collector of records. My childhood prepared me to seek out friends like August. I asked him about his family, if there were artists among them and yes, in spades. All three Northcut siblings are artists. His brother, Thommy, tended towards photography and his sister, Beth, is a painter. With those kind of genes, I had to ask which parent they came from.
August thought for a moment as if it were the first time he had even asked the question of himself and said his mother was incredibly encouraging when it came to her children’s interest in pursuing the arts and she was definitely creative herself but she expressed it through interior design or garment construction so he wasn’t sure if it directly tied into his practice.
And, for the very first time in our conversation, I made a connection before he did. As if pulled from another nostalgic dream, August tends to weave fabric patterns and textures into his work. I’ve noticed flashes of paisley and lace that always remind me of my grandmother’s living room. August took the last sip of his gin and said, “Well, I can’t argue with that and I’ve always thought that paisley can be way cooler than we give it credit for.”
Chorus / Return / Coda by August Northcut, 2019
August Northcut is never satisfied to do the bare minimum and made a Green Music playlist to soothe your artist block and can be reached at randomdreamtectonictry@gmail.com.
August is the principal illustrator for Kentucky to the World, a cultural non-profit based in Louisville and his work can be seen across their channels as well as a newly released playing card deck featuring notable Kentuckians which can be purchased to support their ongoing multimedia storytelling work.