Nicole Tibbels

Nicole Tibbels came to oil painting after a year of watercolour classes that left her wanting more. Drawing has always been her natural language, and she still reaches for it, alongside watercolour sketches and collage. Oil painting, she'll tell you, has been a stretch, and she occasionally blames her brushes.
She has found her way in through the detail: understanding that every artist is essentially solving a problem gave her a way to think about her own work. The impressionists, the old masters, Lucian Freud, Hockney and Hopper all sit in her eyeline, alongside Beryl Cook, whose warmth and wit in paint is a different kind of permission.
She has been painting for six years.