British Painter Nicola Tremain Captures Grief in Acrylic On Canvas

“Sharanya” (portrait of Tremain’s late friend)
Credit: Nicola Tremain

In addition to being an Emmy-nominated documentary director, Nicola Tremain is a self-taught British artist producing expressive still lifes, portraits, and abstract paintings. Her works, which have earned her several top marks, awards, and a spot competing on Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year, are typically characterized by bold strokes of color and imaginative use of focus. (Side note: If you are a fan of The Great British Bake-Off and yearn for a similar style of artistic-but-low-stakes competition shows, the Sky Arts series are fantastic.) 

Nicola Tremain’s artistic process

Tremain’s vivid acrylic pieces are most often borne from a practice called “intuitive or automatic painting,” which means that each piece is unplanned, and evolves over time.

“Quite often I smear leftover paint at the end of the day onto a fresh panel or canvas, then I will use that as a starting point – responding to the random placement of colors and forms in a playful way, often applying paint using anything but a brush,” she explained in an interview with The Holy Art Gallery in London.

“All The Paths We Could Have Taken”
Credit: Nicola Tremain

Exploring her memory and imagination, abstracts can become landscapes, still lifes, or portraits and vice versa. The depth and texture of her pieces are a result of the spraying, smearing, or scraping of the paint, which eventually emerge into her subject of choice. 

Capturing moments of beauty

On her website, Tremain says that her work is “driven by a desire to capture fleeting moments – those transient, often overlooked instants where beauty reveals itself quietly.” This urge is apparent in most of her works, but perhaps most beautifully in her portraits. 

“Staving Off Grief”, a self-portrait after the loss of a close friend
Credit: Nicola Tremain

In one self-portrait, titled “Staving Off Grief,” we are invited into one of those moments as if sitting with Tremain during a difficult time. Her expression is one of guarded pain, as if she were just barely keeping herself together. You can sense her grief, her loss and the energy it takes her not to succumb to those depths of emotion.

“Letting Go”
Credit: Nicola Tremain

Her still life paintings tap into a similar sense of melancholy. “Letting Go,” a pseudo-surreal painting depicting white flowers in a vase, leaves one with the feeling that the flowers -– once more vibrant, perhaps — were somehow neglected, in need of tending. 

“Where Are You?”
Credit: Nicola Tremain

Painting as grief therapy

In the interview with Holy Art Gallery, Tremain revealed that a portrait of her late friend Sharanya was the most challenging for her to paint.

“I knew I needed to paint her as a way to grieve,” she said. “Throughout the process, I cycled through finding her likeness, then losing her, then finding her again. It was an incredibly emotional experience that I knew I had to go through. So often we suppress our emotions, art can really heal. Now, when I look at the painting, I feel such a strong connection to her.”