Deirdre Nicholls sculpts people from life and paints landscapes in watercolour, and the two disciplines contradict each other on purpose.
A watercolour has to be caught before the rain comes. A portrait bust has to survive every angle and every light long after the person who sat for it has gone home. She works in both, which means she spends part of her week racing and part of it deciding whether a mouth is one millimetre out.
We wrote to her because almost nobody looks at a human being for that long any more.
A photograph takes a fraction of a second. A phone camera takes less. Sculpting a head from life takes hours across several sittings, with the subject in the room, turnable, aware of being studied. Whatever appearance is, it shows itself differently at that speed, and the people who work at that speed are worth asking.
She is based in the Scottish Borders, exhibits through Compass Gallery in Glasgow, and has sculpted, among others, Nelson Mandela.
What follows are her own answers, lightly edited.
You work both in three dimensions and in watercolour. What can a sculpted body tell you about a person that a painted one never will, and what does watercolour catch that clay lets slip?
In sculpture you have to make decisions about the pose, the expression and the whole atmosphere you want the piece to exude when it is completed. You cannot decide all this at the beginning, it evolves as you get to know your subject. When I work with a sitter, I am not trying to catch a frozen moment of expression, I want the whole of them, I want their soul to shine out of the finished work. To this end, I spend time observing them, talking with them, getting them to relax and open up.
Sitters are usually a little nervous at first, because they do not know what the process is. Once they have settled into the second and subsequent sittings, it becomes easier for them. It is a very unusual experience to be scrutinised for hours on end, but somehow both the sitter and I forget this as the work takes over and carries us both along. I usually start by drawing and taking photographs, then taking measurements with calipers. Sitters find this unthreatening and learn to trust me as we go through a time honoured, logical process.
When I am making watercolours, I am usually outside somewhere wonderful. Living in the Scottish Borders, this is not difficult. I work according to the seasons, very fast if it is about to rain, or windy or cold, and when it is sunny and warm I can sit and make something more peaceful. With watercolours I am really trying to catch a fleeting moment: the season, the sea, the rolling hills, sometimes just a single tree in a special place.
The same applies with life studies and models. I like to draw very freely, observing the model closely, often reaching for a big brush to stop me fiddling with detail too soon. I am after her personality, her gestures, her pose and her essence, and for this the work has to be swift and decisive. The key thing is to be prepared to fill the bin, since much of what is created is not good. I am not trying to make a finished work, I am looking, with intent and deep focus, until time is suspended and there is only the model and the brush in my hand. This work is the training that makes the sculpture possible.
Back with the sitter in the sculpture studio, things develop more formally, though the subject does not have to wear the same clothes or be seen in the same light as in a painted portrait. They do not even have to sit still. One sitter, Prof Sir Timothy O’Shea, former Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, wrote and rehearsed speeches throughout. Much of my work at this stage is watching, listening and making many small decisions. Often I get the person to talk about things they care deeply about, loved ones, pets, their work. When this happens, their nervousness vanishes and a different expression appears. This is the magic moment for me, and it is a gentle hunt, a bit of a game, to get that expression to return when I need it to.
Then there is the technical aspect. Watercolours are almost disposable, it is not unusual to make a dozen pieces to get one worth keeping. With sculpture, no such luxury is permissible. The anatomy has to be correct, the proportions properly adjusted, the whole subtly arranged so that it still works as a finished piece long after the sitter has gone. Towards the end, I can spend a week on the final expression alone. It has to work in every light and at every angle, and changing one tiny thing, a corner of the mouth say, affects everything else, so hours are spent moving from the eyes to the mouth and back again. No such care is required, or wanted, in a watercolour, you would ruin it if you lost the spontaneity. Working in both mediums lets me marry the freedom of gesture available in painting with the formality a well executed portrait bust demands.
A figure can be anatomically correct and still dead on the stand. What is the thing you add, or take away, that makes it start to look inhabited?
When this happens, my response is to walk away and do something else, so it is out of my head. I cover the piece and leave it for a few days at least. Returning with less attachment lets me be more objective about what is not working. A second pair of eyes helps enormously, even a non artist’s. Failing that, I place a mirror beside the piece and look at it in the mirror. This stops me thinking something is correct when it clearly is not.
If a piece really is dead on the stand, and I have been there, I destroy it and start again. It is not worth wrestling with something your gut tells you is going nowhere. The second or third attempt usually shows far more confidence, because the ground has become familiar.
When you sculpt a body, how much of the character sits in the face and how much is already decided by the shoulders, the weight on one hip, the way the neck carries the head?
This is the classic contrapposto pose, perfected by the Greeks in the fifth century BCE once they had learned to free the weight and mass of stone from the rigid Kouros poses of the Egyptians. The pose tells you nearly everything, facial expression is secondary, in my opinion. Think of the great Greek statues of athletes: the gesture, the stance, the silhouette, is what carries the piece.
If I am sculpting a body, the whole must be in harmony. The position of the toes matters as much as the gesture of the hands. The expression on the face has to be incredibly subtle so that it does not dominate, it is a figure, not just a portrait. There should be no more detail in the face than is necessary to convey who this is.
Tell me about a piece where you deliberately left something wrong. What was it, and what did the error give you that correctness would not have?
I work hard to make a piece anatomically logical and aesthetically pleasing, and that can mean exaggerating the length of a limb or the projection of a forehead so that the piece reads correctly from below, for example. I would not call that wrong. If a piece is to be set high on a building, it has to read logically from underneath as well as look right from a distance.
Sculpture gets walked around, and paintings get faced. Does knowing that a viewer will see the back of a head change how you build the front of it?
Picture Rodin’s The Kiss. Now tell me, where is the front, where is the back? There is no such thing. Sculpture is about the round, complete from every angle. There should be no more emphasis on the back of the head or the ears than on the eyes and mouth.
This is why Sir Francis Chantrey always had his sitters portrayed at a slight angle, so the piece stayed interesting from every viewpoint. I try to do the same. Sir Tim’s wild Irish hair was a case in point, it was an important part of his character.
You are based in the Scottish Borders rather than a capital. Has working away from the centre changed what you make, or only who sees it?
I used to have a studio at Summerhall Art Centre in Edinburgh, and I still miss it. It was a fantastic centre of creativity, with artists, musicians, scientists and writers all in residence. My studio there was tiny, on the third floor with no lift, so I had to move, but I would go back in a heartbeat.
Being away from the city gives me easier access to my current focus on UK rare and protected breed farm animals, and the freedom to walk in some of the most beautiful landscapes anywhere. But I miss the interaction and the buzz of the city, and I am at a real disadvantage in that my studio is remote. It is not easy for gallery visitors to come and see me, and I would be low on the list when there are so many good artists in the city already. I think I would be making more portrait heads if I were based there, and I would enjoy that.
You spend your days deciding how a body should be looked at. How does it feel when you are the one being looked at, in a gallery, at an opening, in a photograph?
This is not something I consider. If I am being photographed for a magazine article, I think about the work, because that is what is interesting to look at. If someone is looking at me in a gallery, I assume I have simply been identified as the artist. For me, everything comes back to the work, so being looked at feels work related rather than personal.
Which of your own figures do you find hardest to walk past in your studio, and why that one?
Two busts in my studio matter a great deal to me. One is Nelson Mandela, I have a plaster cast of the large bronze bust that sits in Glasgow City Chambers. I love looking at him, because it is now old enough that it feels as if someone else made it, and I can simply enjoy his large, gentle presence.
The other is a reconstruction I made of the head of Alexander the Great, done as part of my dissertation for an MA in Classical Studies, drawing on mosaics, sculptures, wall paintings, archaeological evidence, including the bones of Philip II discovered in an untouched grave in Macedonia in the 1970s, and contemporary writing, to make a fair attempt.
Once a piece is finished, I feel both a professional detachment and, with some pieces, a real emotional attachment. I have been working on a series of small female figures for the past few months, and it is getting to the stage where I can almost sense a presence emerging. That is exciting.
What this conversation leaves us with.
That the pose carries more than the face, which is inconvenient for a culture that photographs itself from the neck up. That the difference between a correct object and a living one is often nothing you can name, only something you notice when you put a mirror beside it. And that a week spent on the corner of a mouth is not perfectionism, it is the recognition that nobody consciously registers a face that works, and everybody instantly registers one that does not.
Deirdre Nicholls works in the Scottish Borders and is represented in Glasgow by Compass Gallery.