Artist’s Studio: Nancy Cadogan

Olivia Cole talks trees with Nany Cadogan, an artist committed to oil paints.

Inside Nancy Cadogan’s Studio

I first met Nancy Cadogan as a talented young artist. Her exuberant commitment to paint at a time when very few noughties art school graduates thought that was a good idea was memorable. Over the years since, she’s gathered her own contemporary art following but stayed
true to that first love.

She is still to be found covered in oils. The traditional medium is just right for the sense of timelessness in her world. In recent work, she has been obsessed with the Romantic poet John Keats. Her response to him was the subject of a moving and atmospheric collaborative exhibition, Gusto, with his final home, the Keats-Shelley Museum in Rome in 2020. But none of Nancy Cadogan’s compositions necessarily belong to our own noisy, distracting time.

‘There are no obvious references to modernity in my paintings,’ she says. ‘I suppose that sometimes gives them a hint of melancholy. Sometimes stillness, sometimes nostalgia, but I don’t see them as nostalgic. I see the things that interest humans as the same things that have always interested humans.’

Or perhaps, her vivid colourful canvases speak to our hankering for a simpler way of life. She likes to ‘conjure an idyll’. You might find a stack of favourite books (like in her painting at the entrance to Soho House in Greek Street, with the attendant fantasy of the time to re-read them) or a candle burning as an inky dusk gathers, framed by an open window. There’s the play of light on her and her husband’s favourite spot on Lake Como, where the landscape never alters, or closer to home, as she says, there’s ‘nothing more wonderful than lying under the branches of a comforting oak’.

She says: ‘I think there’s a currency in images of things that are beyond time.’ Her female figures in her paintings (in particular in Mind Zero, at the Saatchi Gallery) are solitary and at peace. As if unaware of being observed, they are alone with thoughts and daydreams. These imagined compositions – with the moon or a glass of wine, or a few stems in a vase – are an invitation to the viewer too, to simply be. Just as for the Romantic poets she finds so inspiring, ‘the world is too much with us…’

That feeling is everywhere around her studio location. Nancy works in a basement in Westminster with amazing windows. It’s an unexpected oasis of calm right underneath city streets where everyone has at least one place to be, many devices and pressing deadlines. All that frantic activity somehow helps her focus on her own.

Her next big show, at the Garden Museum in London in 2025, will be a direct confrontation with the pastoral and that element of escapism that’s always been present in her work. I get an in-progress glimpse of The Lost Trees exhibition on her studio walls. These new paintings explore our emotional connection to trees, grief for the altering landscape, and draw on her love of the shelter of those comforting oaks in Oxfordshire where she escapes with her family at weekends. ‘It is not lost on me that I seem to always paint the place I’m not,’ she says.

She’s excited to have found such a perfect home for this exploration to be shared. ‘There’s a lot of ambition in the art world and the act of creation,’ she says. ‘But this is a project that I’m able to be really ambitious about because it’s kind of bigger than me.’ The idea of exploring the emotions around trees that have been displaced from the landscape was already taking root before public outrage over the felling of Sycamore Gap but, as ever, she seems to have tapped into a universal feeling.

Nancy Cadogan shows at the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in Palm Beach from 26 January to 22 February 2025. kristinhjellegjerde.com | The Lost Trees exhibition runs from 4 June to 15 July 2025. thegardenmuseum.org.uk