Fashion designer Wendy Nichol paints with her whole body (literally)
Fashion designer Wendy Nichol paints with her whole body (literally)
The celebrity favorite — known for her ethereal, witchy dresses and jewelry — talks about her first solo art show, "Departing the World Once More."
Wendy Nichol paints with her whole body.
She’ll strip down to shorts and a bralette, put on a transcendental meditation playlist, and “imprint” herself on the canvas. She grinds pomegranate seeds with her shoulder, smears blueberries with her feet, presses essential oils with her hands.
It is, she said, a couturier’s approach to making art.
“I was thinking when I make a dress, I take the fabric and I put it on my body and pin it,” said Nichol — a fashion and jewelry designer who has recently branched out into painting. “I was trying to think, ‘How would I form something in paint in this similar way?’ So my first instinct was that I needed to make physical contact with the canvas.”
“I felt like that was the way that I would get the pattern of my energy, of my frequency across,” she added.
Nichol, 52, conjures ethereal dresses and fine jewelry with a distinctly witchy vibe. Celebrities such as Beyoncé (most notably in her “Drunk in Love” video), Rihanna, Zoë Kravitz, and Lindsay Lohan have all worn her clothes. But about two years ago, she took a painting class at Victor D’Amico Institute of Art, in Napeague, Long Island, and it changed her life.
“Departing the World Once More” — through Oct. 27 at The Museum Building at 9 Mercer St., in Soho — is her first solo art show. It features 24 recent paintings: moody portraits of fashion models and it-girls, as well as haunting abstracts “imprinted” with Nichol’s body.
When Nichol paints, she said, she seems able to tap into things that happened long ago, lifetimes ago — into energies and emotions that linger in the air, or reside inside her.
“I feel that I had somewhat of a psychic download of these sort of past lives of women that have gone before,” she said, gesturing to “Missing Witches,” a large 12-by-7-foot canvas hanging from the ceiling, featuring abstracted faces that she free-painted.
“[I felt] that the witches and sages and teachers and women maybe in my past or the past of our collective consciousness showed up here through this sort of download that I was receiving.”
You can see my interview with her at The New York Post. We talk psychic downloads, witches, past life regression, Beyoncé, and more. I didn’t even get into “cellular regeneration” or the power of crystals. There was a lot.
Anyway, I do recommend the show. Her paintings are good! Her portraits are particularly seductive — they have the kind of glamorous frisson of Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings of modern women from the 1930s, but done in a softer, more realist style.
The exhibit also features two hanging wire sculptures and an installation of her dresses hanging from the ceiling, floating almost like plumes of smoke.
And, yes, the famous “Drunk in Love” dress is there.
Apparently, Beyoncé had tried something like 200 dresses, and Jay-Z picked Nichol’s, a diaphanous frock made of 10 yards of black silk tulle for the singer to wear while cavorting on the beach and in the ocean for the video. When Nichol got it back, “it still had some seaweed and holes in it,” she said. But she left it as it was: “It definitely has some Beyoncé magic in it.”
