Artist Spotlight With Nicola Grellier

"I'm Nic Grellier. I'm a figurative artist... mainly. Most of my work enimates from the figure and drawing. But a lot of my work is to do with dressing up. I have quite a few children and they do enjoy dressing up and so they have been my hapless models for years. It's fun and it's taking on... a costume, a different persona. Allowing yourself to be someone else."

"Actually I really enjoy puns and that sort of humour in words. I hope that my work is humorous. I have fun making it. [laughing] I think I've been collecting various motifs, I suppose, and sometimes patterns, sometimes those strange diamond shapes that I seem to be using all over the place. And I'm embracing them, I'm not quite exactly sure what they are but I keep using them. I keep wanting to use them."

"I work on lots of pictures at once and I like to let them just dry. So they'll have a few days off. They might sit there for a year or two. Or I might... complete obliterate what I've been doing before or use an old picture and just reuse it again. But that to me is all part of the life and soul of the picture, the body of it."

"Over the years, probably not really on purpose but I've gathered the colours that I like to use. And it's not a huge range, there's probably two blues, one green, two yellows, two reds, two browns, a black and a white. "

"I love oil paint... deeply. [laughing] It's rich and I like the slowness of it. I like the layers, it's sort of delicious. I've been using oil paint for so many years I just feel like it's my thing I know. It's a bit like butter [Laughing]. "

"I like this cadium ocher mix with a slight sludge in it. Come back over it as well, it's just, you know when it's dried a bit, it's just really rich. I use high quality paint because.. again, I've been doing it for a long time and I hope that my work will keep going and once it's gone away from me I hope it's not going to fall of the canvas. So I like to use really good quailty paint and here you can see how rich and lovely this is. You know, I'm pretty hot on good materials and I want a properly concluded piece of well made art that I'm putting out there. "