Nicola Powys

Spoken in English. Their words, as they said them.

I wish everybody could paint. It would solve a lot of problems.

There'll be people now trawling around shopping malls for something to do, buying things they don't want when they could be with me in my studio playing and feeling much happier.

In order to focus when I walk into my studio, often the first thing I do is pick up something to draw with and shut my eyes and draw with it and just do a couple of scribbly exercises like that which is a loosening up thing. And sometimes I do the same thing with my other hand. And these are very common tools for artists and for draftsmen. It's loosening up and warming up. If I don't do that, I've almost wasted the time in the studio because I go over and over and over.

So my aim in making two dimensional art, I work with mixed media, painting and drawing and sewing. I I'm looking for simplification, and I'm trying to simplify what I see. And I've been working like that for many years now. And I need to do it. It's like oxygen. If I don't do it, I get ill. I literally get ill. Doesn't go anywhere often, but it doesn't matter.

I have a couple of students and, she if she's not doing something with her hands, so she comes to me and we just throw paint around. If she's not doing something with her hands, she gets covered in eczema, a rash all over her face. And we were in the studio one day and a guy walked past and he said, oh, what are you doing? I'm looking for a space. And he had lost his space, his studio space. He was a puppet master. Made puppets, made marionettes. He said, I'm desperate to find a space and I can't find one. And he said, look. He unbuttoned the top of his shirt, x mark crawling up. And he said, that's appeared in the last month because I can't express myself. So I had these two people in the studio going, thank you for giving us the space to be able to do that because what happens otherwise we it eats away at you from the inside.

And I think that, you know, half the world needs this outlet. There are many people who don't, and that's fine. But there's a lot of people who do, and they don't know it, or they don't allow themselves to know it, or they've been told they don't need it. And my theory is that these are the people wandering around with unexplained illnesses, that if they could just grab a paintbrush or a piece of clay, we'd sort them out. I do believe that.

I want more people to have this you know and I and they won't allow themselves to do. They're here on retreat, they're here to find, they know it, they've read about it.

They know that if they give their child a paintbrush this is good for their child but they don't know why. They don't know why. All they see is it's making a mess on the kitchen table, so they start to limit it. You know?

And there are many people who are, who I see anyway, I'm sure there's a lot more, but, who are still tied to their phones and the advertising messages and do in their chat groups online and their peer group and what they ought to and should and ought to be doing at certain times in their lives and they're just in it. And it starts from now I've got this little grandson, it starts from then. You have to fight this stuff. You gotta really fight to be an individual.

The teaching side of me would be like, come on. I can show you how you can have a good life. Without changing much. Without changing much of what you're doing, without leaving home, losing your family, leaving your job, you just it's a slight shift in perspective. Because people want it. They want it. They really want it. They don't know. They know they want something different and yet they're too I suppose it's scared or they'll find any excuse to not do it. The work itself, whether it's seen or not, yes, it's important. It's nice to have recognition for work that you do. But it's not as important as just being able to do it, the process, and the learning, and the discovery of being able to do it. Some people travel, some people do sport, some people play chess, some people read, whatever it happens to be, whatever floats your boat. But for me, it's taking color and mark, anything, I don't care what it is, and making it sing.

And when it does, it's great. It's real. I I skip home.

I skip home, have a glass of wine. And if it's not going well, I'm pretty miserable. Yeah. So I think the actual process of making work is something that you have to have a tough skin to do and don't expect everybody to understand what you're doing.

I just see the students that I have, they completely change and grow. They absolutely it becomes almost a therapy for them, and they say that's what it is for them as well. And then they go away. I've had been with them for a couple of hours or something. They go away, and I go, now I can paint. And I'm totally inspired from them, which is fabulous. So there's a real exchange going on, which I really like as well. Very important part of the process, ripping it up, getting it wrong. Recognising that you've got it wrong and then get looking at it and don't go, oh I got that wrong. Look at it and go, what can I pull extract what can I pull from that to create something much better? And there's always something. Always. And it's great. That's what I love. I love finding the positive stuff out of whatever it is that's going on. And I have students who occasionally run workshops in my own apartment. I have a woman who comes who has she's an accountant and by her own admission cannot, has never, can't. And to be honest, she can't. I mean really cannot make her hand do what her eye is seeing but she works through it and she tries and I help her and I show her about space and negative things. And by the end of it she's produced something that neither we're looking at it and going, that's beautiful. That's incredible. I don't know how we got there. She doesn't know how we got there. But we get there. We get there in the end.

And and she just leaves bemused, you know, but it's up on the wall. It's like, I like it. People come, that's fantastic. Yeah.

So I love that.

My wife. And then when I realized this is my art, this is what I'm trying to I'm not a painter. I'm not a painter. I'm trying to use art to help other people or point things out or show, you know, instead of writing a novel, you know, just try and illustrate how I see things because I do see things slightly differently when I talk to other people. I am amazed how I see things differently. And there's a lot of things I don't see that they do see. Dark for a while because I am not a painter, actually. Not very good with paint. But I'm I am good at picking up on vibes. I'm very immediately putting it down, and it works. So I have to create the vibes.

Literally, what you feel comes to mind. Okay.

Yeah. I'm very happy with the exposure. Cool. You're absolutely fabulous. Darling. So, yeah. Great. So we're rolling.