Educated England and Malaysia.
1984 - 87 Diploma in Fine Art, Byam Shaw School of Art, London
1983 Foundation Course, Herts College of Art and Design
Nicola Bealing has lived and worked in Cornwall for 18 years, having arrived for a planned visit of 2 months in 1988.
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Horses riding people, men floating through the air on bubbles, skies raining fish or overcast by giant flowers: Nicola Bealing’s world is a world upside-down. As such it stands in the carnival tradition, opening a much needed escape valve on reality.
Today, most people in the west fulfil this need with virtual reality games on their computers; Bealing does it the old-fashioned way, with paint on canvas. She belongs in an absurdist line of Northern European painters, like James Ensor and Max Beckmann, who have exploited the licence of the carnivalesque to tickle civilised society’s underbelly. And recently, like Jack Butler Yeats and Laura Knight, she has also ventured into another favourite arena of the imaginative escapist: the topsy-turvy world of the circus top.
When I interviewed Bealing ten years ago, she told me she was not a fan of the circus, and it’s obvious to anyone who knows her work that her imaginative universe is her own creation. But this show includes a large canvas titled The Ring which, at six feet across, dwarfs Laura Knight’s The Grand Parade in Newport Art Gallery, and is even more densely packed with performers. There are firebreathers, pole-balancers, globe-walkers, back-flippers, plate-spinners, headstanders, horn-blowers, fat lady jugglers, bareback riders, a tiger-tamer, a trick-cyclist, a clown with a wheelbarrow and a sailor with a mermaid tucked under his arm. Unlike Knight, who was once compared by a critic to a circus strongman ‘overdeveloping the muscles of her vision at the expense of her nerves’, Bealing doesn’t make exhaustive studies of individual figures in a composition. Having done three years of figure drawing as a student at the Byam Shaw in the 1980s, she now relies on memory and nerve, flying – like a character in one of her paintings – by the seat of her pants. The undiluted force of her overactive imagination is channelled directly into paint – fluid, juicy oil paint, as responsive as watercolour and as quick with light and movement as the shoals of fish she is so fond of painting. Bealing is one of very few contemporary painters with the confidence to paint figures – human and animal – in movement, and the panache to inject them with life.
Her wilder fantasies, like the image of the boy who has sprouted extra arms like branches to accommodate a flock of visiting starlings, make you wonder where the ideas come from and if her pictures have a hidden moral. Do the naked men clinging for dear life to the cloud of soap suds drifting off into the blue haze of Bubbles – or the inky blackness of the nocturnal version, Night Bubbles – sound a warning about boom and bust? The tension in the air is almost palpable as we wait for the inevitable pop! and plummet. And could Horse Race, with its desperate human figures struggling to carry horses towards an invisible winning post, be a comment on the hopeless indignity of the rat race? Perhaps. But some of Bealing’s images, like Owl with Stolen Rose, defy any such obvious interpretation. In Bealing’s world, suggests the owl’s expression, things are presumed to make sense until proven to be nonsense. And who’s to say the wise old owl is wrong? The Brazilian priest who was recently lost at sea while test-flying a cluster of a party balloons in support of a charity would have made a perfect subject for a Bealing painting. Her art reminds us that life is a lot stranger than we think.
'Humour is an important element in much of my work, but always balanced with a dark undercurrent’, Bealing has said. Some of her images might be seen as modern-day fables, others as merely fabulous – and others again, like the cartwheeling children on a beach at sunset, as simple, spontaneous eruptions of painterly high spirits.
Laura Gascoigne
February 2009
quote
1984 - 87 Diploma in Fine Art, Byam Shaw School of Art, London
1983 Foundation Course, Herts College of Art and Design
Nicola Bealing has lived and worked in Cornwall for 18 years, having arrived for a planned visit of 2 months in 1988.
.jpg)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
Horses riding people, men floating through the air on bubbles, skies raining fish or overcast by giant flowers: Nicola Bealing’s world is a world upside-down. As such it stands in the carnival tradition, opening a much needed escape valve on reality.
Today, most people in the west fulfil this need with virtual reality games on their computers; Bealing does it the old-fashioned way, with paint on canvas. She belongs in an absurdist line of Northern European painters, like James Ensor and Max Beckmann, who have exploited the licence of the carnivalesque to tickle civilised society’s underbelly. And recently, like Jack Butler Yeats and Laura Knight, she has also ventured into another favourite arena of the imaginative escapist: the topsy-turvy world of the circus top.
When I interviewed Bealing ten years ago, she told me she was not a fan of the circus, and it’s obvious to anyone who knows her work that her imaginative universe is her own creation. But this show includes a large canvas titled The Ring which, at six feet across, dwarfs Laura Knight’s The Grand Parade in Newport Art Gallery, and is even more densely packed with performers. There are firebreathers, pole-balancers, globe-walkers, back-flippers, plate-spinners, headstanders, horn-blowers, fat lady jugglers, bareback riders, a tiger-tamer, a trick-cyclist, a clown with a wheelbarrow and a sailor with a mermaid tucked under his arm. Unlike Knight, who was once compared by a critic to a circus strongman ‘overdeveloping the muscles of her vision at the expense of her nerves’, Bealing doesn’t make exhaustive studies of individual figures in a composition. Having done three years of figure drawing as a student at the Byam Shaw in the 1980s, she now relies on memory and nerve, flying – like a character in one of her paintings – by the seat of her pants. The undiluted force of her overactive imagination is channelled directly into paint – fluid, juicy oil paint, as responsive as watercolour and as quick with light and movement as the shoals of fish she is so fond of painting. Bealing is one of very few contemporary painters with the confidence to paint figures – human and animal – in movement, and the panache to inject them with life.
Her wilder fantasies, like the image of the boy who has sprouted extra arms like branches to accommodate a flock of visiting starlings, make you wonder where the ideas come from and if her pictures have a hidden moral. Do the naked men clinging for dear life to the cloud of soap suds drifting off into the blue haze of Bubbles – or the inky blackness of the nocturnal version, Night Bubbles – sound a warning about boom and bust? The tension in the air is almost palpable as we wait for the inevitable pop! and plummet. And could Horse Race, with its desperate human figures struggling to carry horses towards an invisible winning post, be a comment on the hopeless indignity of the rat race? Perhaps. But some of Bealing’s images, like Owl with Stolen Rose, defy any such obvious interpretation. In Bealing’s world, suggests the owl’s expression, things are presumed to make sense until proven to be nonsense. And who’s to say the wise old owl is wrong? The Brazilian priest who was recently lost at sea while test-flying a cluster of a party balloons in support of a charity would have made a perfect subject for a Bealing painting. Her art reminds us that life is a lot stranger than we think.
'Humour is an important element in much of my work, but always balanced with a dark undercurrent’, Bealing has said. Some of her images might be seen as modern-day fables, others as merely fabulous – and others again, like the cartwheeling children on a beach at sunset, as simple, spontaneous eruptions of painterly high spirits.
Laura Gascoigne
February 2009
quote
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