Nadia Hebson

Nadia Hebson (born 1974 in Romsey, Hampshire) is a British painter.

Life and career

Hebson attended St. Martins School of Art (1993–96) and then the Royal Academy in London (1997–2000).

In 2007, she was awarded the Derek Hill Rome Scholarship at the British School at Rome. In 2008, she was appointed Artist in Residence at Durham Cathedral, and was in 2008 presented with the Sovereign European Art Prize by Jarvis Cocker, Tim Marlow, Sir Peter Blake and Alan Yentob.[1] Her work has been shown by Cathy Lomax and the Transition Gallery in London.

Shows

Solo exhibitions include Lusqvarna, Landguard Fort (an off-site project with Arts Council England, English Heritage and Landguard Trust). She has exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition every year since 1999.

Awards and prizes

In 2003, she was awarded the BOC Emerging Artist Award which was selected by Matthew Collings and Sir Peter Blake RA. She has also received the Andre De Segonzac Travel Award, the British Institute Drawing Prize, the Vincent Harris Award, the Arte Viva Painting Prize, Italy and the Cohn and Wolfe Painting Prize, selected by Andrew Graham Dixon.

In 2005, she won the Duveen Woman Artists Award and the Casson Drawing Prize along with Paula Rego and Frank Auerbach. In 2006 and 2007, she received the Arts Council England Individual Award. In 2008, Hebson was also nominated by Humphrey Ocean RA for The Arts Foundation Fellowship programme.

Works

Hebson makes several specific types of art work, most recently: intense, romantic and darkly atmospheric seascapes and shipwrecks which are reminiscent of the Gustave Doré prints for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

"If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale," observed Edgar Allan Poe in his "A Descent into the Maelström", “you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by the wind and spray together. They blind, deafen and strangle you, and take away all power of action and reflection.”[2] Poe’s description is an account as seen from the inside of the experience he describes. It is presented (even though within a work of fiction) as fact, as an unpleasantly intimate engagement with nature in one of its most inhospitable forms. Nadia Hebson’s paintings call up as one of many reference points the works of Poe, but one’s impression of her relation to the imagery she employs is that of someone who observes an incident, place or individual from a point at some distance from it. Whereas Poe writes as though his claim of personal experience guarantees something important about the occasion he describes, Hebson refrains from such recursive realistic constraints, instead presenting a series of images that appear to take us to locations to which it is unlikely that she herself has been."[3]

Hebson also makes portrait heads in oil on copper (usually of women) reminiscent of Early Netherlandish Painting such as Hans Memling, Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck. Hebson has also moved into installation upon occasion, in an attempt to conjure up the kinds of atmospheres she creates in her paintings. Her work has high emotional content which goes against the grain of prevailingly ironic contemporary British art trends.

Her inspirations are mostly art historical though her titles often give clues to more literary influences like Robert Walser, W.G. Sebald and Herman Melville. In 2006, she curated the group show The Whiteness of the Whale which attempted an artistic response to the famous chapter in Moby-Dick.[4]

Notes and references

  1. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20110716023824/http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=26839
  2. ↑ Edgar Allan Poe, A Descent into the Maelström, in EAP, Selected Writings, Penguin, 1980, pp. 236 - 237
  3. ↑ Peter Suchin, from Letting in the Ghosts, Vane Newcastle, 2005.
  4. ↑ Princeton: Chapter xlii - THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE

Sources

Bibliography

External links