Nigel Conway

[about] [artists] [conway] [events] [contact] [home]

Nigel Conway

Nigel Paul Conway was born in 1968 in Leigh outside of Manchester, England. He is a self taught artist whose creative process has developed over the years through explorations of various mediums. His early artistic process focused on film, photography and filmmaking. In May of 1998, Nigel traveled throughout Tibet documenting its populations and sites. Through his initial photography, Nigel developed his appreciation for the narrative, currently present in his paintings. Elements of space and texture once captured by his photography and his inspiration from characters and images that appear throughout life, made their way into his paintings. In his most recent body of work, Nigel manually layers and removes surfaces of his paintings subconsciously connecting the images of his subjects to a physical reality that the viewer identifies with.
Nigel has had solo and group shows and his art has been featured in publications such as American Art Collector and Bliss magazine.
One of Nigels’ paintings was recently been purchased by the State of New Mexico and is hanging in their permanent collection.
Nigel now lives just outside Santa Fe, NM with his wife and son.

‘ There’s something slippery about the art of Nigel Conway– in the sense that his paintings are in the gallery for about as long as it takes ice to melt… and then they are gone. The buyers wander in, fall in love with the lacquer-faced characters, slap down a credit card and out they go. They’re like little pieces of candy, these paintings—with their licorice lines and glossy palette of cherry syrup and kirsch. A slippery surface like a sweet party glance from a stranger. Look around yourself and enter. A scruffy bartender offers up a drink: Kokoschka liquor with a splash of Arbus citron. Agitated softly, then strain into a fine-strem cocktail garnished with Egon Schiele mint leaf. That’s the Conway cocktail—a pretty-in-pink hyperchromatic julep for the eyes. Serve it up with a maraschino cherry bomb and the art world is whet again with an alluring fizz.’

-Louis Leray

‘The thing about painting for me, the big deal about it, is that I feel compelled to do it every day and to do it at new levels. There’s always something going on in my head, some nonsense up there that I am trying to achieve. So I am compelled to do it. If I let my head wrap around the task of painting, I wouldn’t have a painting out there. My head would have never given me the permission to start being a painter in the first place.’

-Nigel Conway