Visual Storyteller with Nicky Carey
Can art truly awaken your inner child? Jodie Cameron meets the enchanted imagination of our Spring Cover Artist…
Driving into the hinterland, the rolling hills of Reesville, near Maleny, are a patchwork of emerald – not unlike where our cover artist Nicky Carey was born in the seaside town of Balbriggan, Dublin.
A printmaker, painter, and qualified art therapist, his work carries the lilt of his birth country in every line, and a wondrous life lived. His prints are intricate without being precious, with a whimsical wonder that makes you want to lean in closer, to hear the end of a story. That instinct to lean in goes both ways. Nicky has spent years listening to children, to older people, to the land itself, and he talks about the hinterland with a childlike wonder in his eyes.
He says it’s something felt rather than explained. It’s the same feeling he has every time he returns to Ireland, standing on ground that belonged to his people long before he did.
“The way the Indigenous look at the land; you’re part of it,” Nicky says. “It’s the same in Ireland. There’s something spiritual, I don’t know what. It’s very special and you just have to let it be.”
His connection to place evolved from a young age. He loved primary school for its old-style storytelling, poetry and plays delivered by teachers who knew how to catch his attention.
“There was loads of Irish mythology and all the ancient stories,” he says.
Secondary school was more regimented, but a perceptive art teacher noticed his talents and embraced his creative mind rather than trying to straighten it out. His family backed him, but the path still came with sacrifice.
“There’s been lots of losses to keep doing this,” Nicky says. “It’s not a hobby, it’s more of a vocation rather than a career.”
He compares it, half-joking, to a religious calling – devotion without the doctrine. His medium of choice is printmaking – etching, lino and monotype. It’s a slow, deliberate way to work, closer to storytelling than to painting, each mark slowly built up in layers rather than laid down in one pass. After moving to the hinterland, his style became brighter, looser and more colourfully whimsical.
What hasn’t changed is the menagerie of characters that populate almost everything he creates – birds, cats, dogs and fish, each one with its own meaning – birds as freedom, death, or a messenger passing through; cats as the aloof and unknowable.
“It’s childhood that I love. I still have that child in me that sees something completely magical that as an adult, we just don’t look at anymore,” he says. “I try to evoke that, combine it into a motif.”
He finds comfort in ordinary things. His wife Meg, spends her mornings talking to the chickens, loud enough that he can hear her from inside the house.
“I don’t talk to chickens,” Nicky laughed. “I’ve done worse things, but these are the sorts of things I find magic in, and the unusual thing is, other people who’ve had the same experience will see the same threads through my work.”
While the paintings lean whimsical, his sketchbooks tell a different story. Everyone assumes his art is all imagination, but there’s a disciplined, observational habit underneath it – he draws obsessively and realistically – mostly dogs – in airports and on planes, wherever there’s a spare few minutes.
Those sketches all feed straight back into his imaginative work down the track. Nicky never lets a conversation get too serious for too long. Even Missy, the family dog stretched out at our feet, gets a laugh out of him. Zed, the sweet sleeping dog captured in Peek-a-boo-Lasy Day – our adorable spring cover, is at the vet, and Nicky speaks fondly of his little studio mate.
“He still does that pose to this day,” Nicky says. “He just lifts one eye and keeps ignoring me.”
When I share my boys’ love of drawing imaginary creatures – like the rainbow fox whale they drew that morning – Nicky lights up. He keeps every scrap of drawing from his nieces and nephews, pulling them out for inspiration. It’s a technique as much as a habit, borrowed from the Surrealists and Dadaists, close to the same instinct: one artist draws the top of a figure, folds the paper to hide it, then passes it on for the next person to continue, with no idea what’s already there. He’s used the same trick on etching plates, working with another artist without either knowing what the other had drawn.
“We have a similar personality and a similar way of looking at artworks,” he says. “So that works. Children do that all the time, they just don’t call it that.”
That unfiltered way of seeing is professionally trained as well as instinctive. Alongside his BA in Fine Art from Dublin, he holds a Graduate Diploma in Transpersonal Art Therapy, with further training in sensory motor and somatic therapy. For years he ran art therapy groups and private sessions for people managing their mental health. That style of work took its own toll, particularly through the pandemic. The focus shifted toward his own practice, and sporadic workshops that ask something different of the participants.
“The students and visitors are fascinated, especially about childhood, and why they don’t think like that anymore,” he says.”They want to do a workshop not to become more proficient, but to play with that imagination.”
His influences run wide. For years, he’s kept a well-thumbed copy of Freud’s writing on dreams, and talks about Jung’s work on myth and symbol the way other people talk about scripture. Religious art moves him too, minus the doctrine.
“I love looking at the icon paintings, Russian Orthodox, Northern European, Greek Orthodox,” he says. “If you remove the religious part, they’re just beautifully done. It’s simple, it’s direct. At the time, it was to educate people who were probably illiterate.”
It shows up directly in his pieces that hold comfort and confrontation in the same frame, depending on who’s looking. One small etching on the studio wall, built from a childhood memory of the cold outside his family home, is simply a happy one to him. Yet for several buyers, it brought up something else entirely.
“It’s not an interpretation,” Nicky says. “It’s actually their story, their biography of when they were living and alive. Some of it’s traumatic as well. It’s only ever meant to be a starting point.
“I don’t technically compose it,” he says. “All of these things just feed into it, it goes back to that unconscious imagination. When you dream, things just turn up. I love the idea of doing that on a conscious day too, just using what’s around me.”
Nicky and Meg are planning a workshop in the coming months, opening the studio to anyone wanting to spend a day chasing that same unfiltered, childlike way of seeing. No art degree required.
As I prepare to leave, Nicky asks if I left my car windows down.
“Mind the fairies, a few might have jumped in,” he chuckled. “It was nice you didn’t need a translator either.”
Driving home, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face, hoping a few fairies just might have jumped in with me.
Follow Nicky’s work on facebook @nickycareyart and on instagram @nicky.carey.art
WIN!
Nicky is giving away a framed limited-edition lino print, Fish Feast with hand colouring valued at $550 to one lucky reader. Visit our WIN page to enter!
