As a student at Chelsea School of Art in 1987, Nic Fiddian-Green was dispatched to the British Museum to find something to sketch and re-create. It was the first time that he had encountered the frieze from the Parthenon Sculptures: ‘One horse head in particular stood out to me.’ The resulting piece made all those years ago, in clay and lead, is on the windowsill of his studio, while in the middle of the space is a far larger version of Greek Head. It is made from polystyrene – ‘a fantastically versatile substructure’ – which Nic is alternately building up with plaster and carving down. Eventually, it will be cast in bronze. ‘The past 40 or so years have taught me that, although you can’t better something, you can aspire to a principle,’ he says, with a modesty that belies his reputation as one of the foremost equine artists of our time.
For not all Nic’s horses share the same genesis as his Greek Head. At the crux of his practice is academic study ‘comparable to Stubbs’ and an essence of form that goes beyond reproduction. Still Water, a majestic 33-feet-high bronze of a horse’s head drinking, first appeared in London at Marble Arch as a temporary loan and is now a permanent fixture on Park Lane, while the dynamic Mighty Head is in the grounds of Chatsworth in Derbyshire. There are further works at Goodwood, in West Sussex, at Daylesford in Gloucestershire, at Ascot Racecourse in Berkshire, and across the Wintershall estate in Surrey, where they bestow a sense of Arcadian sublime on the undulating fields.
It is on the Wintershall estate, too, that Nic has worked for the past 30 years in a purpose-built studio. The doors are left open when it is warm, allowing the breeze to disperse the plaster dust. A second, smaller room acts as his winter refuge. It is there that he experiments, practises other procedures – he used the lost-wax technique for a collaboration with Lalique – and pursues the lesser-known strand of his oeuvre, the votive nature of which is mirrored in the biblical plays performed at Wintershall. But, says Nic, ‘Christ doesn’t always come easily. Whereas horses… I’d work on them every day for 40 more years, if I had them’.
Sladmore gallery is showing his monumental work in Wellington, Florida, until May 3, and in its SW1 gallery during London Art Week, June 28-July 5: sladmore.com.
