Olivia Nicholls Bates - Fine Artist.

My practice centres around narrative painting — scenes that feel like film stills or time capsules, where history, memory, and atmosphere converge. Drawing on my background in costume design and fine art, I approach each composition as though I’m staging a moment on screen: carefully lit, emotionally driven, and rich with period detail.

Influenced by storytelling traditions — from mythology and fiction to lived history — I explore how visual symbols and archetypes carry emotional weight across generations. While earlier pieces embraced the fantastical and symbolic, my recent work grounds those ideas in tangible worlds—rendered with painterly realism in acrylic under romantic, golden light.

At the heart of it all is the desire to create a portal: a painted moment that transports the viewer, even briefly, into another time, place, or way of seeing.