Nicola Green

Who is Nicola Green?

Nicola Green is an English portrait artist based in London. She rose to prominence as a portrait artist in the late 1990s and has gained international acclaim for her keen ability to draw out the essence of her subject; whether observing an individual or exploring wider social and cultural issues.

Working in a variety of mediums, Green seeks to understand and reveal human stories by creating her finished work from extensive primary material. In making her work, Green distils her subjects in a three-step process. The first stage consists of internalising a vast amount of research; from her own photographs and sketches to newspapers, magazines and collected paraphernalia. She then reduces profile, gesture and context to the minimum information needed to maintain critical form. Using the printed medium as a drawing device, she experiments with pattern and repetition before settling on the final images.