HOW I BECAME A PORTRAIT ARTIST AND CHILDREN'S ILLUSTRATOR
Born Nicole Dersley in 1983 I lived in the restful Eastern Cape of South Africa, until I moved up to Johannesburg to complete high school. For years I was unwilling to pursue art as a career, so I designed artwork for music bands and clothing labels and other projects, but formal portrait art for me seemed financially unviable. In 2002, I moved down to Cape Town to pursue a degree in occupational therapy in the Western Cape, where learning the in’s and outs of a cadaver might have felt a little reminiscent of a Renaissance artist. Before I completed my degree, I returned to Johannesburg and began a fashion label with my sister, Jacqui, called Hermanna Rush. A mid-career highlight was being the art director on an award-winning South African Music Awards (SAMA) DVD for Harris Tweed. Despite these vocational meanders, I have enjoyed drawing, creating and experimenting since I was about 6 years old, and now, pursue art as a full-time career.
ABOUT MY WORK
Working from life, I aspire to having my sitters feel loved and seen. I love experimenting, but my current method of portraiture is to take photographs of the people I'm asked to paint. I use these as research to figure out what makes the person visually who they are. If they sit for a portrait we share things like tea and blueberries while I paint. I give myself around four hours to render the person onto the canvas. Then I return to the photographs to work specific details back in. I've called this a hybrid between painting from life and from photographs. I enjoy moulding facial features in oil paint or pastel or coloured pencil and I like to mix my mediums.
Conversely, I also enjoy a sleeker technique by “oiling-up” paper and I use the translucency to paint both the underside, and top surface. This also allows for indirect effects as well as the reverse image to be a second aspect of the portrait on the back - or as artist Jacqueline Griffiths-Jones termed it - it offers "another side" to the person.
In terms of children I think littlies are very, very special. I love their physical vantage point and how they are themselves all jam-packed into a little 'case'. Their minds, personalities, hopes, spirits and souls are encased in their bodies; the part I get to represent. Some children will sit very, very still while I do their portrait. But mostly, they are quite wriggly and giggly. In which case I will either get what I can while they are physically in front of me, or work from photographs, or both. Most children around the age of five give me wonderful decisive answers, usually one at a time, about what colour they would like to see in "their picture" and if they would like to be drawn in pencil, painted smoothly or in a really, really fun way in bright colours! They also tend to jump up and "check out" what is happening with fair frequency. Ironically though, the portraits tend to come out looking 'serious', since they sense that they need to still and physically can't hold a smile for an hour. But, whether live or from photographs, I especially like to know about the things that they love most and try to portray their beaming, bustling hearts into an image that conveys their personality.
