About 15 years ago, artist Nicole Newsted decided she was done with Hello Kitty, even though the bow-wearing feline had been there for her for better or for worse since her childhood in upstate New York.
“I’ve always been drawn to this type of imagery—toys and stuffed animals—that feels sort of trivial but for me, has held something more magical,” recalls Newsted, 45. “I don’t know if it was because I grew up in a rural area and anthropomorphized these creatures and made friends with them when I was young. But when I turned 30, I told my husband, ‘This is it. I’m an adult. I’m giving up Hello Kitty. I’m so over her.’ And you know what? That lasted six months. I just couldn’t do it.”
Since that epiphany, Newsted has been leaning into the things that inspire her most, and has since filled her new Tequesta studio with the fluffy, colorful objects that captured her imagination as a child. For Newsted, these timeworn objects have unlocked memories that she is pouring into her work, which is displayed at the Avant Gallery in Miami and in collections across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
“Her work has a subtle sense of humor, which I like,” says Anthony Record, curator at Lighthouse Art Center. “Obviously it references childhood with these toys and happy memories, where everything is fluffy and candy colored. But Nicole teases out these interesting emotional layers in her work, where, for example, you’ll have an old toy that looks really exhausted and done.”
Art was an inevitable career path for Newsted. She grew up on a property in upstate New York that her grandfather owned—but her father, his brothers, and many other relatives wound up living there, too. “It wasn’t a weird commune or anything like that,” she says. “It was just a group of progressive people who were all very talented.”
Newsted’s father was a trained horticulturist-turned-wildlife-photographer, who ventured into documentary filmmaking in the final 20 years of his life. Her mother, meanwhile, is an artist who creates miniature dioramas and houses, as well as fabric art. Her aunt owned a graphic design firm in the 1980s, which gave Newsted a sense of what could be. Here was a woman who had her own business, and a healthy and child-free marriage where she and her husband traveled the world together. Now, that aunt is a conservationist who specializes in Eastern timber rattlers, which benefit the ecosystems of which they are a part. One uncle is an architect, while another uncle is a painter and sculptor who became her mentor.
“Everyone around me was artistic in one way or another, but they also showed me that a life pursuing the arts was valid,” Newsted says. “Yeah, you could make a living, and some did better than others, but it didn’t matter as long as you were pursuing the process—which they all did at different times and in different ways in their life. I feel like if I hadn’t had that around me, I’m not sure I would have decided to devote my life to art.”
During high school, Newsted’s father traveled extensively to create nature documentaries, and he brought her along for those trips. “I became good at documenting the places we went, and drawing them and writing about them,” she recalls. “By my senior year, there was this feeling of anxiety, this sense that I had to get out of there because I wanted to be doing more to set myself up somehow. And my uncle said I could come stay with him in Hoboken, where he was doing a lot of set design and film work.”
But her uncle’s studio was what captured her imagination. There, she learned to work with clay, painted, and drew. She went to life drawing sessions, and she practiced, even when she didn’t want to. She was a teenager, after all.
“It was such a great time and it set me up well to apply for school and take the next step,” Newsted recalls. “But I also feel like there was something I missed by not seeing through my senior year with all my friends.”
Originally, Newsted says, she planned to study at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. It was familiar because she had been traveling there with her father. But the night before she was supposed to leave, she decided she couldn’t go through with it. She needed to be around palm trees, not the bitter cold she knew all too well. Shifting gears, Newsted got into Arizona State University on a scholarship, and studied fine art and art history.
“I was really interested in plein air painting, and really enthralled by the desert” she says. “I mean, the colors, the smells… it was just like being on a foreign planet compared to upstate New York.”
In those years, Newsted says she traveled a lot to paint landscapes and still lifes that caught her eye. She has had to work at it constantly, she says, admitting that she doesn’t feel as talented as some of her other family members.
“I find the things I choose to paint inform me greatly about what I need to work on, and it’s all still unfolding for me, you know?” she says. “One of the things my uncle gave me is to embrace who I am and what I’m drawn to. And after so many years of talking with him and working with him, what I finally realized is that we’re the same, almost, because he’s just working on the things that he loved in his childhood, too. He was more inspired by 1950s monster movies and sci-fi, but he’s never given up that inspiration, so I shouldn’t give up my inspirations either.”
One of those inspirations is her husband, Jason Newsted, the former bassist for Metallica. They met in 2000 when Nicole was working at a sushi restaurant in Phoenix. Jason flew in to town to visit a friend, but his plane arrived late on a Sunday, and the sushi restaurant was the only place open.
“He came in and we connected and we went on our first date that night, and that was it,” she recalls. “I was really young, so he’s put up with a lot in terms of growth and same with me for him. We’ve gone through a lot of life together.”
And they’ve found that they have a shared interest: Nicole encouraged Jason to take up painting after a shoulder surgery made it impossible for him to play guitar.
“That shoulder surgery took away something that was very important to his everyday happiness,” she recalls. “I don’t know if I got tired of him not having something to do, but I was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you try painting?’ I had the sense that he’d be really good at it because his work is very expressionistic, and that’s who he is in the way that he communicates everything. Well, he destroyed my studio. I had this really clean space and he threw paint everywhere, but he was so happy. I came home and found him covered in paint. And he hasn’t stopped painting since then. It was cool to watch that unfold.”
In 2003, Jason had just finished touring with Ozzy Osbourne when he and Nicole decided to stay in Jupiter to visit his father. After that stay, the couple kept returning to the area and bought their first place there in 2006.
“There were hardly any restaurants there at the time,” recalls Newsted, who married Jason in 2012. “There was one Bikram yoga studio. But we fell in love with the area.”
Now, the Newsteds spend about 70 percent of their time in Jupiter and the rest in New York. In Jupiter, they spend time with friends at places like Lighthouse Art Center, where they’ve shown their work and Nicole takes classes, and restaurants like LILA Coastal Mediterranean and Mood in Tequesta. Jason has a recording studio there, too.
“Jason jams all the time,” she says. “It’s like a literal rotating roster of musicians down here. And sometimes when I’m not working, I like to shadow my friend who is the vet for Busch Wildlife Sanctuary. I feel like I’ve met some of the coolest women down here and I’m just so grateful for that.”
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