Nicholas Volley; figurative painter
Hyfler/Rosner
Single-minded figurative painter
Sylvia Lahav
The Independent
13 May 2006
Nicholas Volley was a passionate, single-minded figurative
painter. For him, art was always, simply and exclusively,
about painting. Since 1984 he had worked in the same London
studio, in Spitalfields - where he took his own life.
He was born in 1950 into a working-class family in Grimsby.
His childhood was both usual and unusual: he joined a band,
rode a Lambretta and hung out with the local lads. But at
home there was always art. His father painted a full-scale
interpretation of El Greco's crucifixion in the garden shed
and a copy of Van Gogh's Bridge at Arles on the bathroom
wall of their small terraced house.
Nick Volley attended the local art school and then the
Slade, where he was taught by William Coldstream, Euan Uglow
and Patrick George. There Uglow educated him in the serious
business of eating good food, drinking fine wine and having
your own ideas about what art was.
When he was awarded the Boise Travelling Scholarship, he
characteristically chose to spend it in Cézanne's
Aix-en-Provence, and in 1979 he was one of a group of
painters selected to show in the Hayward Annual. Following
this he was represented by the Ian Birksted Gallery and
Browse and Darby in Cork Street and his work entered many
international collections including those of Paul Smith,
John Cleese and the late Duke of Devonshire.
Although in his younger years Volley appeared to resent the
fact that he needed to teach to supplement his income, in
later years he was a popular, charismatic and enthusiastic
teacher.
He was a painterly painter and a painter's painter, whose
ideas about art almost always went against the tide. He
stubbornly stuck to what he knew best, drawing and painting
his family, his friends and the everyday objects which were
important and familiar to him.
But his decision to paint in a traditional manner, so deeply
inspired by Rubens, Manet, Van Gogh and Cézanne, was not to
follow an untroubled path. He spoke angrily about trends
towards video art and performance. He strove to reach that
point when, in his own words, "painting becomes an
emotional, intuitive experience without theory".
For all his strongly held views, in private he engaged in a
personal battle with notions of modernity and how it might
be possible to make a painting which was both of this world
while also part of the tradition of painting which he so
loved and in which he passionately believed.
He was exasperated by the rapid progress of technology,
which he believed was eroding so many of the personal,
intimate touches of life, like writing a letter with pen on
paper. He doggedly avoided using a mobile phone.
His love of people was complicated. He wanted to paint
pictures with figures but often found the stress of having
another person in the studio almost too much to bear.
Volley's paintings were deeply felt, rigorously seen and
never-endingly altered. Faces, people, objects, chairs and
tables appearing and disappearing at the speed of lightning,
which was sometimes frustrating if you had spent hours
posing for him.
In 2002, in a large international retrospective at the Water
Museum in Lisbon, he showed many of his early paintings as
well as newer still-lifes, portraits of his partner Sylvia,
views from the studio and landscapes showing fleeting
glimpses of his beloved dog Florrie. And last October, in a
suitably rough, unmodernised but beautifully lit space in
Spitalfields, he showed his latest works, dark, possibly
troubled but so "done". They looked majestic and grand.
Nicholas Andrew Volley, artist: born Grimsby, Lincolnshire 3
December 1950; married (one son, one daughter); died London
5 April 2006.