Becky Nuttall Artist Poet Devon, United Kingdom

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Becky comes from an artistic and literary background based in Brixham Devon. She studied art in the early seventies but got diverted by literature and, latterly, the social development of adolescents. The research undertaken as part of her MA reconnected her to her own adolescence and its influences.

Becky was born in 1957 and coming from a creative family, she was always drawn to imagery and how artists interpreted the known and unknown, the sacred and profane, the human, the humane and the inhumane. The convent she attended as a child and teenager was dominated by religious imagery, the secular world mostly ignored unless it mirrored conformity and patriarchy. These challenged her liberal upbringing. During her 1970s art school education her influences became rock music, fashion, feminism, popular culture, Dada, modernism and the places and objects her family created and loved, becoming symbols of love and pride in her cultural heritage but also the conflict and loss that comes with becoming older. Becky creates the works to acknowledge these and the impact religious violence, guilt, piety, sainthood, patriarchal art history and conformity had on a young girl – considering how she challenged and interpreted these in her adolescence. Becky creates intertextual works in adulthood as she deconstructs and reconstruct the relationship between her education, Catholicism, her adolescence, her identity and her family’s creativity to create a new context in her own art. Her art and writing emphasises the importance of juvenilia on later creativity and identity. Becky is not a Catholic and although challenging, this has become an interesting collaboration in her art and poetry.

Becky is the Chair of Torbay Guild of Artists and an English Riviera UNESCO Global Geopark Ambassador Artist

Becky’s work has developed into distinct themes:

Influence of religious educational dogma in childhood and adolescence and the influence of feminism and being an emerging female artist in the Seventies. The importance of juvenilia on later creativity

Referencing the objects, people, places and influences in her past including rock music, literature and popular culture. Works include taking iconic images of male poets, artists, rock stars and characters from children’s literature. They are reinterpreted as women and girls wearing iconic male rock star jackets, suits and clothes. Works also include paintings that represent ‘our generation’. This is the generation of women born in the 1950s and were adolescents in the 1970s

Becky’s works are figurative, narrative subjects. Researching family photos, traditional religious iconography, the representation of women in popular culture and the creativity of feminist women artists, her works flip the male gaze and the submissive roles of her generation of women. She invents narratives with characters from her imagination. Paintings may start with a portrait but end as a stranger. These strangers gaze at you or past you but occupy the same space.

Becky is influenced by the Dada women artists, Synthetism artists, Modernist literature, Mina Loy, Barbara Hulanicki, Biba makeup, mid-century ceramics, Vivienne Westwood, David Bowie, David Hockney, Ossie Clarke, Celia Birtwell, Joseph Cornell, Lucien Freud, Botticelli, Paul Gauguin, Pre Raphaelites, children’s literature, rock music, drum solos and guitar riffs.

Becky’s blog on her website recalls 'our generation'. The influences on her artistic practice including popular culture, her artist father, his friends, the environment and social history where she grew up, her convent education, art school education and the importance of juvenilia

Becky’s works are paintings, mixed media and collage. She paints mainly in acrylic and ink block but she also uses mixed media often including parts of her original childhood and art student works which are collaged into paintings. Works are on wood, canvas or canvas board. Works with a reference to religious iconography re – imagine the paintings in convent schools. Becky sometimes collages copies of works by her father and children into her work to show the artistic tradition that runs through her family.

Collages are works influenced by found mythic, ancient, religious and antiquarian textual images.

Artwork

Reliquary, Textile, 2021

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Artwork

Becky Nuttall Artist Poet Devon, United Kingdom

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