A Fascination With The Equine Form: Nic Fiddian-Green

A Fascination With The Equine Form

Artist Nic Fiddian-Green’s 30-year obsession with the shape of a horse’s head has led him to personal fulfillment and commercial success—and he’s still captivated by the work.

By LISA SLADE Photos by RICHARD FOSTER

When Nic FiddianGreen was attending a course at the Chelsea College of Arts in London, professors at the school sent the students to the British Museum for a day with a simple instruction: Find something that inspires you.

As Fiddian-Green wandered the halls, a Greek marble carving caught his eye. It was a statue of a horse’s head—the horse of goddess Selene—from the east pediment of the Parthenon, with an estimated origin of 438 to 432 B.C. The horse’s ears are flattened backwards; the mouth is open, nostrils flared and his eyes bulge. He doesn’t exactly look welcoming by any modern horseman’s standards. But, pinned ears and all, the artwork drew in Fiddian-Green immediately.

That one horse’s head set the young artist, who’d been primarily focused on drawing up until that point, on an entirely new track.

“It kind of obsessed me—caught my attention,” said FiddianGreen. “From then on, I worked on various images and transcriptions from it, over and over again, for years. For 30 years, it’s sort of

occupied my consciousness, I suppose.” Now Fiddian-Green, 53, is a household name in the art world. Or, at the very least, if you don’t know his name, you’ve likely seen his sculptures, which range from the miniscule to the massive. One of the best known, Still Water, stands 33' tall and rests in London’s Marble Arch. There’s a Fiddian-Green sculpture at the Ascot Racecourse, and another that stood at Goodwood Racecourse for several years. Still others are scattered across England, the United States, Australia, Russia, Hong Kong and the Middle East. “You’re only as good as your last work, really. It’s an “I’m just sort of traveling with it ongoing journey,” said artist Nic Fiddian-Green. and seeing what it means,” said Fiddian-Green. “People do seem to connect with the form, even though they don’t have any relationship with it. Collectors will buy it, but they don’t need to be regarded as horse people.” In contrast to Selene’s horse, Fiddian-Green’s sculptures possess soft eyes and half-mast ears. They’re often depicted with the nose facing down, so that the horse appears to be drinking. Across the

world, they inspire people to approach them.

“I’m not an art critic, ipso facto; I’m just moved by art in the sense it touches your spirit or your soul,” said F. Turner Reuter Jr., owner of the Red Fox Fine Art gallery in Middleburg, Va., who helped bring a Fiddian-Green piece to the National Sporting Library and Museum in Middleburg several years ago. “When you see, especially on the larger scales, these heads he has done—Still Water, for instance—they just move you. It moves everybody. It’s a very compelling thing. You just want to touch it. You’re attracted to it. It magnetizes you.”

SLOW AND STEADY SUCCESS

Fiddian-Green grew up around horses, learning to ride as a child. He attended Eton College in Great Britain, and then he took courses at the Chelsea College of Arts, where he discovered his main artistic passion was sculpture, before obtaining a bachelor’s degree in sculpture from the Wimbledon College of Art in London. He also earned a master’s degree from Saint Martin’s School of Art (Great Britain).

“I picked up clay when I was about 20, so I was quite late to work in three dimensions,” he said. “I was primarily a draftsman, and then once I handled clay, I was off. I still draw. I love drawing; still drawing is an observation of life, but it’s secondary really to my clay work.”

Around the same time, Fiddian-Green met his wife, Henrietta Fiddian-Green. They’ve been married for 25 years now.

Though it was only 1983 when Nic came across his horse head muse, he hosted his own exhibition in 1986, at the Vanessa Devereux Gallery in London, and his commercial popularity grew slowly but steadily from that point. But for his first many years as an artist, Henrietta, who has an artistic background herself, did the exhibition planning and coordinating.

“After our third child, he was picked up at Sladmore [Contemporary] gallery, and that was just perfect timing,” said Henrietta. “We didn’t really want to do it anymore. Having four children is pure mania!”

Nic is still represented by the Sladmore gallery in London, and it’s where many of his pieces are displayed as well.

His works didn’t start out so massive in scale— and they’re not all that way as Nic also does miniature versions of his equines—but over time, Nic found the

Nic Fiddian-Green’s horse head sculptures grace city parks and open pastoral landscapes, in addition to resting in art galleries across the world. The massive Still Water in London’s Marble Arch is one of Nic Fiddian-Green’s best known works, and he doesn’t mind if people wander up and give the horse a pat.

value inherent in size.

“It gently grew. I started off with a 10-kilo casting,” he said. “As the years went by, it gained in size. It fell over a few times, and then I propped it up, and then it fell over again. It got bigger, not because big is everything, but just because I started to realize it could affect landscape and urban situations; it could be more powerful. It wasn’t just limited to gardens and mantelpieces and indoors. It started to have effect on the land, which became very interesting.”

Now his sculptures are placed in myriad locations and settings. Some, like the one at the National Sporting Library and Museum and like many at Sladmore, are in galleries. Reuter first saw one of Nic’s works in person during The Armory Show art fair in New York City.

“I walked around the corner, and I saw Still Water. I think it was 10', and I just said, ‘Jesus.’ I’d never seen it before,” he said. “I’d see the 10" version, which is OK, but when I saw that, I said, ‘That’s awesome.’

“I’ve reached that level of appreciation because I look at hundreds of thousands of objects a year,” he continued. “I’ve developed an eye for things that are special—and it’s something very special.”

Some of Nic’s sculptures occupy busy city parks or squares; others are on open pieces of farmland. When he begins a new sculpture, Nic rarely knows where it’ll land as its final resting place.

“I tend to work in my studio, so they’re not necessarily specific to a place,” he said. “I’m always moving them around at home. They’re a little unsettled. When people say, ‘I’d like to put one there,’ in all honesty, sometimes they get it right, and sometimes they don’t. The most interesting thing is when someone says, ‘Here’s a place. Can you make one for this place?’ That’s quite rare. I can only think of one commission specific to a place, so the size was important, and I kind of wanted to bring something of the spirit and the field and that landscape [to the piece], so it was quite integral.

“They’re often seen on these cliffs, almost sort of elevated or separated from the land,” he added. “In that sense, they’re almost like museum pieces that aren’t necessarily placed in context. But they get there.” Now that they’re so popular, Nic said some owners have started building pools of water for them, a natural background since some of the sculptures appear to be drinking. “That can be quite beautiful and serene and quite fitting, but not many have done that,” he said. “There’s one coming out to Florida, to Miami, which they’re building a pool of water for it. That will be quite a good example of someone who’s thought about it in advance.” But wherever the statues exist, Nic doesn’t believe they’re precious works of art no one can touch. He doesn’t mind if children climb on the larger pieces in parks, or if people decide to give the nose a quick stroke.

Nic believes there’s something intrinsic to the form of a horse head that attracts people, even those who aren’t riders. They’re drawn to the expression of the animal, which is an expression of the artist’s own feelings.

“The horse head became an object through which I could express myself,” he said. “It was the mask, almost the façade, or the face through which I could ultimately begin to express my feelings

of my experience in life. Our relationship with the horse, being one of the most important animals in terms of our evolution, it’s the most important.”

IT’S STILL A JOB

But Nic’s life isn’t just about his relationships to his horse pieces. He stays grounded thanks to his large family. Together Nic and Henrietta have four children, Samuel, 23, Annie Rose, 21, Marigold, 19, and Moses, 17.

“The children, they’re quite creative in their own ways,” he said. “We’re a fairly free-spirited bunch; we go with the wind.”

Samuel started as a ceramist, and then he decided on a career swap.

“He’s a very sort of perfectionist, and he’s an amazing chef,” said Henrietta. “So he’s into that art form, which is really interesting.”

Annie Rose is in college for painting, and Marigold is studying nutrition, while Moses is more interested in drama. And while they’ve all grown up watching their father’s success, they also know it wasn’t an easy road.

“If you said to them, ‘What is the life of an artist?’ They wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, you just airy fairy around, and it all comes pouring in,’ ” said Henrietta. “They know it’s work; they know it’s stressful. It can be 24/7, but then nothing for months, and you go where the work is. That’s what Nic’s always done, and he will always put work first. You never know what’s going to happen, so you never rest on your laurels.”

At their farm in Surrey, England, the couple keeps a variety of horses—some polo ponies, Thoroughbreds, Connemara ponies and an Irish-cross. Nic and Henrietta foxhunt occasionally, and Henrietta rides nearly every day. All four of their children ride, with the oldest playing polo.

“We ride out,” said Nic. “We have a beautiful property here that we live on. We’re surrounded by it; we’re country folk. It’s pretty part of us.”

But the horses serve another purpose, too. Nic uses them as models when he needs a little real-life equine inspiration, even bringing them into his studio on occasion.

“I tend to stylize the horses while I’m working on them,” he said. “I’ll use them up to a point for reference, and then I’ll work over them and alter the proportions to suit the composition—what I’m trying to achieve in the expression of the eyes and position of ears, in the mouth. They’re the parts that will give the expression for me.”

Nic’s days usually begin in his studio before 6 a.m.

“I like an early start—quiet, silent sunrise, time for sort of reflection and observation,” he said. “Breakfast is at 9, my own marmalade, the finest in the land.”

The Process

When Nic Fiddian-Green begins a sculpture, he starts working with clay or plaster.

“That’s made on a frame in studio, or within the stable yard in front of a horse,” he said.

Once he’s satisfied with the piece, he makes a mold of the clay or plaster, keeping the mold and discarding the original clay. Next the piece of art undergoes a lost-wax casing process, an ancient method that’s existed for thousands of years. The inside of the mold is lined with wax, and then a ceramic shell with the wax goes into a furnace. The wax is melted out, leaving a hollow. The bronze is melted separately, and the liquid metal is poured into the hollow part of the mold.

“The ceramic shell is then smashed off pretty instantly after the pouring, and then you have your bronze,” he said. “It’s beautiful. It’s an amazing medium, and then the coloring is the most amazing thing. Then finishing the piece is an art itself.”

Fiddian-Green works with foundries across Great Britain to obtain the right metal casings, usually bronze or lead. He’s always seeking a particular finish and coloring for his pieces.

“It’s critical, so I’m quite involved in that part,” he said. “It’s not just sort of shipped out and just them run away with it and do what they want. I’m very much in control of that because I think it’s an important part. I still love, and I’m still learning about, what we can achieve with the material of bronze—color and finish. It’s an amazing medium once you start looking into the detail available with it, the amount one can push it to different levels.”

Once the entire work is complete, the next step is transport, involving massive trucks and cranes.

“You just lift them up with the right slings and blankets,” said Nic’s wife, Henrietta Fiddian-Green. “It’s actually quite easy to transport them across the world as well.”

“For 30 years, it’s sort of occupied my consciousness, I suppose,” said Nic Fiddian-Green of his long-term fascination with sculpting horse heads.

Then it’s back out to the studio from about 10 a.m. through the afternoon.

“It’s not always to program, but it’s quite structured—it has to be really,” said Nic. “You can’t go on and on and on all day, which sometimes it does if I get obsessed with something. I try not to do that because it can get a little out of hand.”

The Sladmore gallery keeps many of Nic’s pieces in stock, ranging from smaller works to the massive ones. He also has a waitlist for commissions, and he does an occasional painting in addition to his sculptures.

“I’m working on a portrait for an amazing horse who won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe [France], called Treve, for a client,” he said. “I went out and worked directly in front of the horse, and I’m now finishing it in the studio. That’s quite an unusual commission, but it’s great. It’s interesting to try and be as accurate as the client wants, really, without going ridiculous. It’s just the head, which is unusual. Most clients like the legs and all that, which I’m not very good at.”

Nic also still carves in marble, including some miniature versions of his massive horses. When he was hospitalized for leukemia treatment in 2006, Henrietta brought plaster into his room, and he worked on the smaller horse heads. It was also from his hospital bed that he did the first models for the Still Water that now resides in Marble Arch.

“I love using my hands,” he said. “I love working in many, many different mediums. As long as my hands are moving then I’m quite happy.”

After weathering the life-threatening illness, which required more than six months of serious treatments and then a lengthy recovery period, Nic returned to work in earnest, and it’s been since the tough time that he’s found even more success.

“I think it makes everything more important,” said Henrietta. “I think it’s definitely changed the way he looks at life.”

But as his popularity’s grown over the years, Nic’s had to learn to balance his own desire for quiet work with what the public wants from him.

“It’s hard to balance between family and the world’s expectations and life on the farm and all that,” he said. “That’s quite a difficult part. I normally regard it as just a job. There’s quite a lot of time alone. I have one assistant, but other than that it’s fairly solo and quiet—just getting on with it really.

“It can be overwhelming,” he added. “But I try to keep away as much as I can. I’m just an artist, no better, no worse, and it’s important to sort of keep that in its place. I’ve done some good things, and I’ve been acknowledged for that, which has taken a number of years. It comes and goes. It doesn’t happen every day or every year. You’re only as good as your last work, really. It’s an ongoing journey.”

And as the journey continues, Nic draws more and more fans of his giant, kind horses. Even Henrietta, who spends every day with heads scattered about the family’s property, admitted she’s sometimes taken aback by them.

“The other day I was walking, and there’s been a 16' lead piece just above our house for about six months, in a field,” said Henrietta. “It’s almost normalized and become part of our view, but I was out there, and it was dawn. There were starlings and sheep all over it, and I just found myself thinking, ‘Wow,’ all over again. And I thought, ‘Yeah, he is extremely gifted. This is a very beautiful thing and a very spiritual thing, a very moving, seminal thing.’ I’m rather amazed he makes them sometimes.”

Horse Heads And… Christ Heads?

A few years after Nic Fiddian-Green developed his fascination with horse heads, he got a commission for a piece of art depicting the Stations of the Cross. That launched him into an entirely new interest—sculpting the head of Christ. It’s now his second most-featured subject.

“I think it’s because he’s good friends with him,” joked his wife, Henrietta Fiddian-Green. “It’s just something he’s felt drawn to. He’s a Christian man. But he’s a very openminded one.”