Watch Nicola Green's talk about In Seven Days...
Nicola Green – original thinker and artist has observed and visually recorded some of the most significant and influential people of our recent times – President Obama, Elle MacPherson, Lord Sebastian Coe and Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks among others. We are incredibly lucky that this engaging artist, who is without doubt one of our most interesting British artists of the moment, will be in our gallery this coming January.
Catalogue essay:
We are delighted to welcome back to the gallery Nicola Green, a contemporary artist with a unique eye focused on the people that lead and represent us in modern times. She is forensic in her observation, questing in her curiosity and unceasing in her commitment to creating and gathering vast visual records on each of her subjects before she enters her studio to create the portrait, or series, that she seeks. These hours, days, months, and sometimes years of accumulating evidence and experience, gives Green the platform on which to construct her work. She is able to wander, invisibly, in the shadow of her subject and quietly observe them from all angles. When this is complete, she retreats to her studio and becomes meditative and meticulous in casting aside the complex layers and disguising masks of personality to find and expose the single, simple image that will reveal the essence of the person, and the world that they inhabit. This becomes the portrait that crystallises to her, and us, the story in that moment.
Green’s work cannot be confined by a category or as a cliché but lived as a working philosophy.” 1 - David A. Bailey MBE.
Nicola Green was born in 1972 and grew up in London. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland in 1998 with a Distinction in Master of Fine Arts (MFA) following a First Class Honours degree in Drawing and Painting (BA). Her work has been acquired by renowned public and private collections all over the world including the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Courtauld Institute, London, The Jewish Museum, London and the Library of Congress, Washington. She has exhibited widely in the UK including the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. She was a trustee of the charity Paintings in Hospitals from 2006-2014, is a patron of the Prince’s Drawing School Drawing Clubs and is on the board of the Edinburgh College of Art’s alumni council and is on the Benjamin West committee at the Royal Academy. She won the Andrew Grant Bequest Scholarship in 1997 and a Department for Education Scholarship in 1996.
In Seven Days…
In Seven Days . . . is Green’s homage to President Obama, as he fielded his pitch to become President of America in 2008. It is a portrait of a man, at a time when he became a symbol of hope in the story of Black and White in American and world history. It captures a collective emotion and reaction at a time when it seemed anything was possible for anyone, whatever their cultural heritage.
Green, herself a mother of mixed race children, was driven to record this moment for her sons so that they could see a view of a world that they too could inherit, view how they might be treated and to open their minds to their possibilities. His campaign shone a light on this and she set about making the project happen. In the preface of the original Walker Museum show catalogue, Stephen Armstrong attributes Green gaining access as like ‘a hack on a campaign trail – she used contacts, charm, persistence and ingenuity to coax her way in the heart of Obama’s quasi-military operation, nestling in surprising places and producing surprising things’.
Green made visits to remote parts of America, attended rallies at filled baseball arenas, and armed with a camera and drawing pad, she gathered and recorded thousands of images. She describes the experience as most like a war artist. Green is clear that she is not making a statement or judgement about the legacy of President Obama’s time in office but seeking to convey a sense of the feeling invested by us, in him, during this campaign.
Her return to the studio in the UK is where she spent an immense amount of time filtering the information and thinking deeply and precisely about the final image for each of the seven days. Green comments that she was almost secretive in the works creation, preferring not to pollute the process with the noise and voices being generated at the time. Her prints, which she remarks take longer to create than her oil paintings, are complex, layered and fine. The gold leaf fist punched upwards is reminiscent of Nelson Mandela’s ‘Amandla’, the use of orange as a background colour in ‘Peace’ is a nod to Andy Warhol’s ‘Muhammad Ali’ portraits, Green also reflects on how President Obama’s skin colour was portrayed in the media, and meditates using the super size lens of a press camera staring back at us, reminding us of our role in the drama. Her final images are powerful, arresting and optimistic.
Today, eight years on, and at the end of his term in office, the future has happened. Green’s series now becomes part of the legacy, a way for us to observe, reflect and start to decide how this fleeting, important moment played, and continues to play, out in our global history and heritage as well as to remind us of a time when a mixed race individual, who knew who he was and where he wanted to go, changed our cultural perceptions made what seemed impossible, possible.
For many other mixed heritage individuals in our societies the questions of ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What can I be?’ are messier, more complex and filled with misunderstandings. More mixed race children are being born the world over, a generation of which Green’s sons are a growing part. These are questions that they now face, and which Green herself seeks to understand and encourage out into the open, in order that they, and we, can see through versatile eyes and positively shape the future.
