Art TalkNigel Milsom’s Affair with Art

Nigel Milsom’s Affair with Art

 

A sense of despair, an appetite for malice, the flirting with death and the romance with drugs, defines the man Nigel Milsom and his dark art. His portraits shed light on his vulnerability, nurturing him to shake hands with peace. There is intrigue to it, and this is what makes his grey art speak.

The whisper of hope speaking in that portrait is the cry of a man who felt treated as a pariah, not by society, but by himself

Uncle Paddy, portrait by Nigel Milsom, won the $150,000 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2013.

I may not be someone who has an in-depth understanding of art, but somehow, a great artist never makes you feel lost. When you look at his creation, it has a soul so pure and a story so surreal, something that you have always compulsively played out in your head.

What describes a man’s art is how he has seen life. It’s always the grief and the pain that smothers him and he limns it in the strokes of his brush. Nigel’s essence of his winner portrayal showed the gleam of hope which he saw in his lawyer. He saw him as the reverent man, who can take him out of the dark abyss he was trapped in. The whisper of hope speaking in that portrait is the cry of a man who felt treated as a pariah, not by society, but by himself.

Every passerby has a life as vivid and complex like this, only the path differs

I haven’t met Nigel in person, I am describing the man from what I see on the canvas. His ex-intimacy with notoriety and drugs made him do things which he will never let go of, but that lasting memories of “ex” is what makes his art scream the pain he went through and is the man that he is today.

Nigel chose a path in past which led him to where he is today. He embraced the emotional distress he went through and made peace with the chaos inside him. Every passerby has a life as vivid and complex like this, only the path differs and in the end what matters is what they make out of the chaos inside them.


Featured Images Courtesy: Yuill Crowley

 

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