When Grief Blossoms: Blair Nesmith’s Artwork Makes Everyone Sunny

You’ve seen Blair Nesmith’s work. You might not have realized it, but you’ve definitely seen it. Walking around Philly, scrawled on walls and surfaces, on buses, even as album art and t-shirt designs. Most recently, you've probably seen it blown up on a billboard in New York or as gritty joyful sunflowers featured at the Philadelphia Flower Show.

Blair’s current work consists of cool collages and dancing graffiti that captures the world through his eyes. Despite being a creative growing in popularity, Blair still does not “feel” like an artist. “I still don’t consider myself as an artist, yet I just, I just make stuff.”

Yet his creativity is boundless and his willingness to try new things is insatiable. “Just try different stuff forever. I like it was never any real formula or anything. It is just like just throwing darts at the wall. But it was still fun for me regardless. It was never like a do or die type situation, like this has to happen. Iis just like, I'm gonna try and I feel like it feels that way.”

One of Blair’s most popular motifs is a happy dancing sunflower. Yet Blair’s fascination with sunflowers is actually relatively new. “I moved down southwest like,16th and Chester right before the pandemic,” he says “And in the spring, when we was out there, all the sunflowers start to like blossom over there. And I'm from 20th and Susquehanna, so I never saw sunflowers. So my landlord at the time, he saw how intrigued I was by. So he was like, so why don't you like, do a flower show. So, I came up with the character idea with it, and Sunny was born and started going.”

Sunny, Blair’s newest signature piece is not simply a drawing. To Blair, Sunny represents presence and liberation. “Sunny is free. Sunny does what he wants. Sunny is everywhere. In anywhere at all times. He just all around. He just growing and doing his thing. Not bother nobody.”

That presence and liberation Sunny embodies is what Blair tries to live in his own life. “Sunny is just an extension of me that you can see on the wall,” he says. “I just get to do what I want. Like I say, I just want complete freedom. That's my goal.”

Despite Sunny’s levity and joy, his creator is not without his own darkness. During the early days of his creative journey, Blair notes his own grief. “I was grieving at the time. But I was still trying to put it in a way that wasn’t sad,” says Blair. That grief, he says, he can now see so clearly within his work of that time from his new perspective. “I can tell when I was making stuff over there, I was really trying a lot and trying to say a lot. And looking at it now, I can really hear it.”

When asked who his artistic role models are, Blair, unlike many artists, has none. “Not really. And not even to be lying on some weird stuff. Like, I don't really look out to people. I don't really have time for that. I never want to be able to play role models and outside people and be homies and all that stuff like that. It was just me and my friends. We doing our own thing.”

When asked about his hometown, Blair expresses his appreciation for Philadelphia embracing its own persona and its own style. “Philly is very honest,” he says. “Philly is itself. Philly is a bold city. You can't give “Philly” anywhere else. The closest that you can get to Philadelphia, my travels, is Baltimore and Chicago. But they not really Philly. I don’t know, Philly is itself. I can’t compare it to anything else.”