“My paintings conjure feelings of nostalgia, a sense of place, of familiarity, that you’ve been there before; they remind you of a place you know but can’t quite put your finger on, like you’ve just woken from a dream, and you want to hold onto that feeling.”

Educated at Central Saint Martins, I spent two decades in commercial design as co-founder of a London branding agency. Since 2019 I have painted full-time.

Colour is my primary material: the interaction between tones, their weight and temperature, the way a palette can evoke a place without depicting it.

My work spans large-scale oil paintings and limited edition prints, linked by a continuous process in which each informs the other.

The paintings are abstract, layered oils on canvas, drawn from landscape, light, and the memory of particular places. Many are commissioned for specific settings, composed in response to the materials and light of a space.

The prints begin as photographs of finished paintings, reworked digitally to intensify colour and simplify or distort form. They are remixes, not reproductions. The relationship between painting and print runs both ways. What emerges in one, a colour combination or an unexpected relationship between forms, can find its way into the other.

My paintings and prints are held in private and corporate collections globally and commissioned for hospitality, corporate, and residential settings. Recent commissions include the Chancery Rosewood, Park Hyatt London River Thames and the new Wells Fargo Dublin Head Office.

“Nicole Rose’s luminous abstract paintings hover in that liminal space between place and feeling, ambiguous and absorbing. At once deeply anchored in the familiar yet evoking the otherworldly, Rose’s blended oil paintings catch not exactly what was seen, but what was sensed. Her works invite you to be suspended, for a moment, between the real horizon and an imagined one.”

Gemma Ebelis, Art Journalist