452DARTIST MAGAZINE | ISSUE 136expression and satisfaction. The next thing I
knew, my passion had turned into a profession.
2da: Your work is often centered on nature
and folklore. Can you tell us a bit more
about the ideas behind your work?
NI: Nature plays as important a role in my art
as it does in my life; I feel most at home in the
quietness of the autumn woods, or the noise
of spring reawakening. As I see it, folklore is the
result of a millennia-long dialogue between
man and nature, and I find exploring various
aspects of it through art to be endlessly
interesting. There is so much more to world
mythologies than simple bedtime stories;
it’s a field of research that is always raising
questions that are well worth answering.
2da: Last year for Inktober you collaborated
with poet Hayden Westfield-Bell to illustrate
his poems. How was the collaboration and
has the process influenced your work since?
NI: Our 2016 Inktober collaboration was
challenging but incredibly satisfying, largely
because it wasn’t a one way process: sometimes
I would illustrate one of Hayden’s poems, other
times he would find inspiration in one of my
drawings and come up with verse. In other
cases we would work independently, drawing
inspiration from one word or concept and then
put our creations together and see how they
interacted. It definitely inspired us to consider
more collaborations in the future, both for poetry
and prose. There’s a whole story behind our
Zeppelin piece, just waiting to be put on paper!
2da: Do you have a favorite place
you like to go to draw?
NI: Familiar places are the best places
to draw. I like drawing whilst traveling,
sketching landscapes, people, and old
architectures. For more challenging work
however I rely on the coziness of my studio,
where there’s always a rich supply of tea and
reference books, or on the old armchair at
my family’s home next to the fireplace.
2da: What advice can you give to our
readers who want to develop their drawing
techniques in a similar manner?
NI: Practice a lot, observe even more. Remember
that mistakes are a relative concept and try to
Earth: ink on paper, created
for the Inktober 2016 seriesNereids at dawn: watercolor, graphite, ink, and digital painting