Always be positive and never quit. Manifest your own destiny. · Las Vegas, NV
Manni
Nejade
Original Fine Art Catalog
Available Artwork
“Manni Nejade grew up in San Francisco's Mission District, served twenty-plus years in the U.S. Air Force, and now spends his days painting. His signature shoe paintings pack canvases edge to edge with layered sneakers and sole-print patterns in loud, saturated color, and take countless hours to complete. Alongside them come Pop Art portraits of the people he admires, from Kobe Bryant to Warhol, Basquiat and Haring, all of it collected by Raiders players and music artists.”
— Manni Nejade
The Process
Inside the Studio
THE PAINTING PROCESS
Step into Manni's Las Vegas studio and you meet the shoe paintings first: canvases covered end to end in overlapping sneaker shapes, every one filled with its own tread pattern, its own color, its own small decision. Nothing on these surfaces is filler. He says it plainly: these paintings take countless hours. Between the big canvases he keeps a steady flow of commission work moving. "Trying my best to finish all my commissions for the gallery. It has been nonstop, " he wrote while finishing a Vegas-inspired spaceman, and the studio runs on that rhythm: finish one, deliver it, start the next. Not everything is flat. He also paints sculpture, adding words to the surface: "It was fun painting and adding words to this sculpture, " he wrote of "Reach for the Stars," a piece meant to remind you to follow your dreams. The palette is Pop Art all the way, hot pinks, electric blues, lime green, the black-and-white of a Warhol or a Haring sitting next to a canvas that explodes in color. "Always be positive and never quit."
