Artist and photographer Nic Dartnell first experienced the thrill of commercial success at the age of 18, when he created the cover art for the debut album of supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Throughout his career, he has been intrigued by images that encapsulate aspects of various cultures and spent the 1980s in a study of Navajo sand paintings

In the 1990s he produced a series of intricate pictures of individual African and Asian children and later made a series of five paintings for a book about Jimmy Hendrix.

The autumn of 2009 saw the opening at Bristol’s Grant Bradley Gallery of his colourful and evocative exhibition based on the famous Notting Hill Carnival.

And Nic took time out to explain how his unfolding life story had influenced his art.

I was born in Northamptonshire. My father was a teacher in the Army Education Corps and he was posted to Malaysia when I was five years old so for three years I grew up on the beach, not getting much education but having a wonderful time.

This made a great impact on me because I was really, really, free and I guess this also tended to make me a loner. I had an older brother but pretty much had to make my own entertainment.

There were only about 20 other English kids around and being the Colonial life you didn’t mix with the locals. I was close to my brother and my family but spent a lot of my time just wandering around.

The environment I remember well. I liked the fact that there was a lot of space, jungle, monsoon weather, ants and all that kind of stuff which all combine to make me a bit insular. I also liked playing with my toy cowboys and Indians and sitting and drawing and that, I think, really led into the type of things that I do.

Then we came back to England and I felt completely lost. I did no know what I had done wrong because suddenly I was in this cold and bleak Midlands environment.

Of course The Midlands are fine but for me at that young and most impressionable age, everything just seemed cold and grey. My parents took me to a swimming pool and I couldn’t understand why people were jumping into this big cold smelly bath.

Much later, I came to realise that this uncomfortable experience was why I seem to identify with those who come from outside of England.

I feel British or European but I don’t have any strong feeling of nationalism or anything like that within me. I have always chosen to live amongst other folk so that my ex wife, my girlfriends and mostly everybody in my life have always come from somewhere else.

I have always had that feeling of looking outward, but not so much for travel. I have visited America and Germany a lot but have not travelled widely to other parts of the world.

After arriving in The Midlands, my father was posted to Lanark at a time of deep depression and where, as a middle class English kid, I definitely did not fit in and was bullied and had a dreadful time.

That only lasted a short while but it made a deep impression on me and also again affected me in terms of my attitude towards folk from outside and those who have been mistreated so I guess in a way it was a positive experience.

Then we moved to just outside Edinburgh and that was a really nice place to go because of the culture and the festival and all of those kinds of things.

My parents left and went to Germany and I finished my schooling living with a teacher up there and gained a lot of independence. It was the early 1970s and I met my ex wife and we got it together in the old Hippy days.

I went to Leicester Art College and later to Newcastle which I enjoyed very much. I liked meeting the visiting lecturers and because grants were available in those days, it was like being paid to do your own thing which was very enjoyable but of course like most everything in life, there was a down side.
 
I have always enjoyed meticulous work, so that kind of creation of other worlds, on the floor with my toy soldiers, has continued in my work.

But in college I used to annoy them like mad by making a comparison between children’s games and what I was doing. What I was doing quite obviously looked very serious and they wanted it talked about in serious terms but basically I was saying that I couldn’t play with toys any more so now I was making other worlds by doing these pictures.

I disliked the pretentious atmosphere in which one was supposed to talk about art because I am one of those people who says it’s visual stuff. It’s either there or it’s not there so just look and get what you can from it and don’t ask me to explain it.

I always tended to go home and paint and come in to college and get one of the tutors who knew I was doing good work to sign me in and play the game because I did not much like the factory atmosphere.

I felt that college was a lot about arse licking or intellectualising to the enth degree so I did not fit in very well which resulted eventually in me getting a third class degree, which was as much as saying I was useless.

Yet I had gone out and won a trophy and had got myself short listed for the Royal College.

I later, in a sense, got my own back because I did a study of Navajo sand paintings. For this I applied for a grant from The British Academy and they needed a reference in order to even consider me because they did not usually give grants to people who got third class degrees.

So I went to my old College and the Head of Social Studies wrote a letter saying in so many words that had it been up to him I would have got a first but because I had not confirmed and played the game, I had been penalised.

The Emerson Lake and Palmer opportunity arose before my college years when I was working as an 18-year-old assistant in Bruce Findlay’s record shop in Edinburgh.

Bruce, who later became the manager for Simple Minds, had previously worked in London and knew the people at Island Records.

He liked one of my paintings of a bird and it was with his encouragement that I sent it off and luckily it found favour particularly I think with Greg Lake.

When I finished College, having done that album cover, I moved down to London and got involved with Island Records and did a number of other rock-and-roll type things including a couple of box set covers for Genesis when  they played at Earls Court

But I began to realise I was the kind of person who had something in his head that he wanted to say but not necessarily to the world. I just wanted to do it so I started painting privately and not really with the idea of exhibiting or anything like that.

It was all rather airy fairy and notional. I used to read a lot of poetry and wander around because I loved walking in London especially north London.

My then wife was earning as a teacher and we were living very frugally. I got employment working with kids when I could. I was simply doing the archetypically artist thing of living in a garret although it wasn’t a garret and being very much a loner wandering around with wonderful thoughts in my head.

It was a time when there were a lot of experimental things going on and I contributed a little bit to that. I did something in The Round House and at a place called The Almost Free Theatre.

Then at the end of the 1970s, I started submitting a few pieces to competitions which were not accepted and I was suddenly shocked because I felt the paintings were good and indeed they have since proved very popular and a lot of people are now interested in the particular images I am talking about.

The fact that one of my submissions was not taken, really pulled me up short. It did not have to win but it was worth space on a wall so I just stopped painting.
I thought sod it. What’s the point?

So I thought what shall I do? What I wanted to know was why people painted or made art in the first place? I had already done a thesis in college about Apache Indians because as a kid I had loved playing cowboys and Indians, I loved New Mexico and the space and the desert. 

So I thought, the Apache don’t make art, the Sioux make a little, but the people who really make art are the Navajo so I decided OK I’ll study their sand paintings because there I am looking at a type of art which is nothing like what I do. It’s accessible and it’s been done by people who have not been effected at all by European culture. So I set too and that’s what I did mostly through the 1980s. 

It was also during that period while my daughter was growing up that I qualified as a teacher and started working with kids.  I knew I did not want to be a classroom teacher so I began working with groups which were very often Vietnamese, Caribbean, African, indeed from all over the world and that I loved and did for a long time in London.

I also became involved with an Afro-Caribbean workshop and other community projects but not as an artist.

By the end of the 1980s I had been divorced and had lived in Germany where I had long term friends. I have a son in Germany. I have also been to America several times. Then in the early 90s I met Sonja, my present girlfriend who is Swiss.

I was already painting a little bit but it was meeting her that prompted me to really go back into it. I had kind of worked out why people made art so I thought OK I’ll start painting again and began producing most of the art which is now on my website. 

From the early 1990s to now has been my most productive time. In London I did not exhibit much, I just painted a lot and then later in the 2002 when I moved to Bristol I started  to exhibit, possibly because I was around more people and had a more social life, mainly due  to Sonja really.

It was in 1999 that the rock journalist Johnny Black, with whom I had been at school, asked me to make some paintings to illustrated his new book “Jimmy Hendrix Day by Day 1999, but the publishers only used one of the images and they did not print that very well.

I was once told by a long time friend, the late Arthur Lee who had been leader of the band Love, that he had seen my Emerson Lake and Palmer bird image on a big advertising board above Hollwood’s Sunset Strip in the early 1970s and that he had once spent time with Jimmy Hendrix talking about a painting I had given him.

Friends in Bristol encouraged me to exhibit so I though why not. In the past I had resisted showing my paintings because in a way I never felt that I fitted in to the gallery business.

I decided that I had to do something noticeable so I took my stuff to an arts fair in Olympia and got some contacts from that and some of my pieces were shown in a London gallery and sold for some decent amounts.  

But then I realised immediately, ah! we’re up against the same thing again: the
kind of like: We want to tell you what to paint. We are going to move your art towards the stuff that sells but I thought: hang on, we’re dealing with an irony here that I don’t want to have anything to do with! 

I thought I want to paint what I want to paint and they could put it on the walls and if it sold it sold and if it didn’t it didn’t!

I decided then that the only way to resolve this was to find outlets like the Grant Bradley Gallery in Bedminster, Bristol, which agreed to stage an exhibition of my
work (Silent Songs) in 2007. Then we did an exhibition of Navajo sand-paintings (Earth and Sky) in 2008. And now a show based on the Notting Hill Carnival.

This Carnival work all came about because way back in my Newcastle days, one of my tutors was Chris Mullard, a renowned black writer who originally wrote a book called Black Britain which was quite influential back in the 1970s.

Well, I met up with Chris who was by then chairman of Notting Hall Carnival. He saw some of my work, a lot of which is black orientated, so he suggested that I do a series of images for a calendar and to be used as promotional material.

So through 2006 and 2007 I spent a lot of time taking photos and videoing and amassing loads and loads of images from carnival with that in mind.

I also knew it was possible that the results of my efforts might never be used but it gave me a focus at a time when I needed something to take me away from my l introverted and detailed work.

I also had in mind that if the carnival did not make use of my work, the material could form the basis of paintings for an exhibition, which in the end is exactly what happened and why we have this show at the Grant Bradley Gallery.

While it is rewarding to sell a painting for a reasonable sum, if I see someone walk out of the gallery with one of my postcards and look at it on their way down the street, then I am as pleased as when they tell me I sold a picture for £500.

That’s because I have produced something that someone enjoyed and that’s what art is all about.

It’s lovely to make big sales and win competitions but the whole idea of having the freedom at The Grant Bradley Gallery to ask people to make bids for my stuff and to produce cheap prints purely for people’s enjoyment, is what art is really for.

And that really leads back to the Navajo sand paintings and the whole communal and social aspect of art which I really don’t want to lose. I know it’s not really possible to have that in today’s complicated society but that’s where my head’s at.

Moving to Bristol I have not been able to work with children so much. So now I work with adults, particularly Somalis, and I also have a job with the City of Bristol College supporting students, particularly those who have difficulty with their English, and helping them to get through their courses.

This is fine because it involves me in the social life of the city, makes me feel valued and that I am contributing to the community.

I don’t drive but have a motorbike on which I can ride out into the countryside. I am able to live more simply here and this kind of fits in with my philosophy of going my own way with my art and not having to conform to traditional patterns simply to make money.

There are quite long periods when I don’t paint at all but when I do, I actually sit and talk through scenarios as though I am acting out to a play on the radio but not in any consistent form.

Again It all goes back to that original motivating force of playing with toy soldiers on the carpet, talking to myself and acting out scenarios and other worlds.

It’s like as if it comes from somewhere else; it’s really just a focussing thing. I like where it takes me and when I am working on an area of say four square inches, that’s actually where I go. The whole image comes together as a picture but at any given time my world is in those small spaces all over the painting.

It can be quite frightening and intense, especially working in oils, because a painting which eventually end up as one whole image, can go wrong and then you sit there trying to work out just why it has gone wrong and remonstrating with yourself for getting so het up because after all it’s only paint on paper.

But when it does all go right, it takes you into intellectual, spiritual and God knows what areas and then it’s just good to be there. So that’s about all I can tell you.

 www.nicdartnell.com