A. Savage is an artist who is always walking the ledge between two creative worlds. The first is a musical one, where he throttles through songs playing in Parquet Courts. But the second is a slower paced painting career, where his enviable talent for building a narrative shifts from songwriting onto canvas. While he has no plans to settle in either camp permanently, his painting studio is “wonderful” the artist tells It’s Nice That. “It’s my favourite place in the world.”

Teetering along between music and art is a route Savage has followed since school. A graduate of the University of North Texas’ painting course, he actually enrolled at the college in Denton as a music major; his instrument was the upright bass and he was practising classical performance. The university is renowned for its musical programme, “it’s a real machine for churning out professional musicians,” he says, “I realised that it might make me fall out of love with music.” A quick switch onto the university’s painting programme was made and a career of constantly jumping between music and art, just as he did as a freshman, is what has followed. “Even though I did major in painting, I think it was before I really started taking art seriously… It probably wasn’t until I moved to New York that I started taking it as seriously as I do now.”