Meet Nina Mae Fowler, Portrait Artist To The Stars

Olivia Cole chats to Nina Mae Fowler, a Norfolk-based artist whose pencil drawings centred on cinema’s golden age have drawn a global following.

Artist’s Studio: Meet Nina Mae Fowler

Awards season is here – with the BAFTAs in London and the Oscars on the horizon in LA – but it’s always movie night in Nina Mae Fowler’s studio. The artist works with a collection of film, held on 200 to 300 DVDs. From these she painstakingly searches for split-second moments to blow up and freeze-frame in her incredibly detailed hyperreal charcoal drawings. This unique approach has gained her a practice busy with private portrait commissions and a following around the world.

Brief Encounter was the first film to obsess Fowler with its emotional power, and she has been drawing some of her favourite golden age faces since she was five or six years old. ‘I choose a moment and then capture lots of stills from the surrounding seconds,’ is her explanation of the process. She then makes a collage of potential images and agonises over which one to choose. Whatever animation or AI might come up with, cinema would be nothing without the infinite stories conveyed by people’s fascinating faces.

Fowler, who also sculpts, first caught the eye of the National Portrait Gallery as a young artist in 2008, with a small painting of Carlos Acosta who she had observed backstage at the Royal Opera House. After the piece was nominated in the annual portrait prize (in the same year her future husband, the painter Craig Wylie, won the prize), the gallery commissioned her to depict a series of British film directors.

Working with limited time and her subjects’ crazy schedules, she came up with the idea of drawing them while they watched a favourite film, catching them unguarded and in a kind of communion. The gallery now holds her who’s-who of British film, including Sir Sam Mendes, Ken Loach, Amma Asante and Sir Ridley Scott. ‘They’ve all been photographed before,’ she says. ‘They’ve all had portraits made. I needed to come up with something to spark their imagination.’ She agreed to keep their film choices secret to preserve a little mystery, something between the artist and the sitter that remains private. That sense of the unknown always gives another dimension to her work.

 

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Ten years ago, the rising-star art couple moved from east London to a beautifully remote part of Norfolk, drawn by the studio potential of a derelict coaching house they found in the garden of a Georgian rectory. These days, their two children are often found making their own work in the studio or in the family kitchen next door. To visit Fowler’s side of the studio is to tumble into an incredible archive of cinema gathered over decades. The attention she’s always paid to the human cost of the film industry seems even more prescient in the light of the #MeToo moment.

In Maastricht, if you’re not a collector (unlike Sir Ridley Scott, Jude Law and Shaleen Spiteri to name just a few) you can curl up with Fowler’s drawings at the city’s Hotel Beaumont, which has commissioned new works for each of its rooms. With her eye for an unexpected angle, for this project Fowler focused on the faces of women asleep. In Hollywood, in the days of the strict Hays morality code, this was often a teasing way to allow the camera to linger on a woman in bed. The faces in these drawings include Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Dandridge, but she has named these ‘sleeping beauty’ portraits after the women in the family-owned hotel’s long history, who behind the scenes kept the business on track through the years and generations. As ever, her vision dives straight into the great vault of dreams, daydreams and fantasies manufactured by cinema, with a startling invitation to press pause for a more nuanced look.

Nina Mae Fowler’s work can be seen in London at the National Portrait Gallery and Cob Gallery. ninamaefowler.art