| The Evening Standard |
| Thursday, 13 September 2001 |
Evening Standard - Arts section
Artist Nicola Green is holding a pageant in her home rather than a private view at a gallery. Her art is just as unexpected, finds C R Cecil
Tonight Nicola Green opens her new exhibition, not in a gallery but, in typically unconventional style, in her late grandmother’s Stockwell house where she’s had a studio for six years. It is to be a South London pageant with a cast as luminous and quirky as Green’s paintings – the compere, Green’s ex-boyfriend Arthur Smith, will lead the guests through such acts as Laurie Taylor lecturing on “the systematic deconstruction of traditional portraiture”, and Chloe Ruthven, last seen as Lady Blessington in Kensal green Cemetary, reciting poetry.
John Cooper Clarke will be there. Simon Munnery is coming as a French Fancy and Tony Hawks will be in drag. The sound of Mark Lamarr on the spoons will clatter through the Georgian house.
Green is a portrait painter with a difference. In her pictures decorative and fetishistic objects – hats, muffs and shoes – feature as prominently as the subject, sometimes more so. ‘Self-Portrait with Ermine Muff’ presides regally over the exhibition. Another of Green’s specialities is body parts. Olivia Lichtenstiens’ portrait consists of her ankles and feet in a favourite pair of shoes. Green has depicted the eyes of the late John Diamond’s and Nigella Lawson’s children and the eyes of Richard Curtis’s and Emma Freud’s children, and she has also made a habit of painting subjects in profile – there is one such striking picture of Arthur Smith.
Many of Green’s paintings show shoes or boots alone against a background of deep colour. She buys copious pairs of shoes, regardless of whether they fit, and displays them like sculptures. “I think I’ve settled for the sequinned Union Jack shoes for the pageant,” she says.
Present in spirit – and in his portrait – will be the late art impresario Joshua Compston. Green drew much of the inspiration for her pageant from the two Fęte Worse Than Death events organised in the early Nineties by Compston, featuring YBAs Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Gavin Turk and Damien Hirst.
After his death, Joshua’s mother chose Green to paint his portrait with the help of photographs, his death mask and fond memories. Her Joshua looms down from a great height, his hair as tactile as the fur of her ermine muff, an empty packet of Craven A at his feet.
Strange objects abound throughout the house: a lock of Nicola’s hair here, a stuffed crocodile there, while alongside her portraits are smaller paintings of granny-style objects such as French Fancies and quails’ eggs.
And if it dares rain during the evening, guests will be provided with cover courtesy of Granny’s 32-strong umbrella collection.
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* Click here to listen to Martha Kearney interviewing Nicola Green on Woman's Hour May 2003