A real artist, it seems to me, is not one who is able just to record, but rather who invests his or her work with personality, delves down for essences both in herself and her subject matter and imperceptibly melds them in the work. Craftmanship, essential as it is, on its own betrays the want of an inner life and cannot transmit it. Nicola (a female version of a male name – and she has a sufficient something of the certainty and directness of the male mind) has not complicated her perceptions with the amount of book learning that can destroy retained innocence; her insight and wisdom is natural. All this seems to me to be celebrated in her work. I have five pieces of her’s and will acquire more as resources allow. The first, one of her elephants having met it in a photograph in a magazine, struck home with its Blakean joyfulness.