It is wonderful to be welcoming back artist Nicola Williams to Gray’s School of Art.
Nicola was brought up on a farm in rural Aberdeenshire and she studied painting at Gray’s School of Art 1999-2003, before moving to London to complete her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. The rural environment she grew up in continues to provide her with inspiration and sources of imagery for her work.
Nicola applies a mixture of mediums to her paintings, including gloss paint and Humbrol enamels. Currently she is back in Aberdeen and has a studio space in the Anatomy Rooms in Aberdeen. We hope she will have time to view her own works held in the RGU Art and Heritage Collection which are currently on display on campus.
Along with the work Rabbits, Rabbits, Rabbits which Nicola created when a student at Gray’s, she is also showing some of her more recent work. Having spent many years away from the North East landscape, she still gains inspiration from imagining phantasmagorical drifts/walks via memories of the environment in the North East and Ellon where she grew up. Since completing her MA at the Royal College of Art, her Art has taken her to places as far afield as Derbyshire and Finland to carry out Artist Residencies. She found the landscape of Finland to be beautiful but quite foreboding at times. She has also created a series of gloss and enamel paintings in which the bright colours and uncanny landscape compositions appear to create a heightened sense of reality, along with the use of vibrant high contrast colour and the introduction of figures drifting into the compositions.
We hope that whilst in Aberdeen Nicola finds lots of inspiration for new work to create in her studio in the Anatomy Rooms.
The exhibition is free and end on the 24th May
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