In this current collection of paintings, the stories are many and there for the attentive viewer to wonder at. These images demand a reading – or many readings – for nothing is spelled out. But to be human is to wonder at each other’s lives and so we stand before a painting such as Sprouting like Weeds and find ourselves musing on what can have happened. We can’t help ourselves; we are compelled to ask – just what strange event, what force can have caused these men to be standing up to their chests in water, varieties of weeds growing out of their heads? They are ridiculous, pathetic but somehow all the more human for their weedy growths.

So Nicola sets the scene; she enjoys absurdity and herd-like behaviour. She likes the moments when her characters flounder and sometimes she finds her subjects taking on lives of their own, acting in ways that are inexplicable even to her. Why is the couple in Feeding Time attempting to eat peas in the manner of the old party game, her standing behind him, arms around him wielding a knife and fork, trying vainly to shovel the peas into his mouth? The peas fly and it could indeed be a party game, but somehow we don’t think so. What at first seems lighthearted and fun in Nicola’s work often reveals a darkness, an edge to the humour. It’s a simple step to feeling that surely this couple has found some odd little way of acting out the dynamics of their relationship and it is for us to guess what that might be. But Nicola’s work is always playful; never a cold dissection of our frailty and the work becomes a brilliant analogy of the ridiculousness of our trapped lives that celebrates our endearing ability to find ways of enduring, to some how rub along.

Nicola’s way of drawing the viewer into her paintings is coupled with a terrific skill in handling paint, conveying form in flowing line with the lightest and boldest of brush strokes, conjuring bodies out of almost nothing. And colour is vital, used with enormous intelligence. In Insects on Stolen Dahlias, alizarin crimson, magenta and burnt carmine clash and glow on a deliciously pale green background, jostling for attention as all kinds of insect life creeps and flies in among the startling blooms, undercutting any prettiness, but only adding to their brilliance.

In all the work, the main element perhaps is delight, occasionally a deliciously dark delight in the moment when it all goes wrong, and a huge enjoyment in what it means to be human. One small painting says it all: The White Peacock shows a glimpse of Flora Day, a well-loved event in the Helston calendar, Old May Day, when the schoolchildren’s dance takes place in the early morning and follows its traditional route, partly through private houses and gardens. The sun is shining and the crowds must be gathering. The children are dancing through an unfamiliar corner of town, the gardens of the old people’s home. There’s that warmth, that delight in the beauty of the children who are scrubbed, shiny hair brushed to perfection, all dressed in white with little buttonholes of wild flowers carefully pinned to their collars. They have practiced their dance so well but who can stifle a wicked giggle when they are distracted by the elegant white peacock in his aviary that so unexpectedly appears before them; children trip and the dance goes all awry? The big-hearted witnessing of our small moments of failure, and the pathos we invoke, is a theme that taken by the hand and led by Nicola we can all enjoy.

These paintings offer a gift of that enjoyment, one to rediscover each time you return to the work, but there is also a profound thoughtfulness. In the slow process of making these paintings, of leaving them aside, of discovering more about the characters and events as she returns to them, Nicola has left traces of a consideration of the human state that goes deep into our psyches. There aren’t many artists who have been able to take contemporary figurative painting and make it their own as distinctively as Nicola Bealing and it is the celebratory nature of the work, of all human life, the successes and the failures as well as the conviction and skill with which the work is made, that make it so distinctive. And she can make you laugh - now that is a rare skill for a serious painter.

Karen Townshend, February 2010