Nicola McDonell

Nicola lives on the Black Isle, north of Inverness. She trained in Interior Design in Edinburgh and has worked with her husband in their Architectural Practise for many years while bringing up their older children. In recent years she has been painting, teaching and exhibiting in the Highlands.

Nicola's work explores the boundaries between nature and the man made landscape, particularly man's influence on the environment. Intense colour, abstract forms, buildings, walls and natural features are used in expressing the atmosphere and structure of contemporary rural landscape. Her paintings contrast east and west, the Isle of Tiree in the Hebrides where the westher and colours can be both soft and intense, and her home on the Black Isle, where trees and the formations of walls, fences and buildings create their own vibrant patterns.

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She works from sketches, notes and memory, mostly painting in the studio. Each painting is built up in many layers using glazes to create the rich depth of colour and to convey the feeling of landscape and weather. Nicola regularly exhibits in the Highlands and occasionally in Edinburgh and London, many of her paintings are commissioned pieces in collections worldwide.