Nic Joly
Lessons Learnt | 2023

The hugely popular Nic Joly returns to Castle Fine Art with two more additions to his celebrated Lessons Learnt collection, ‘Addicted’ and 'Kindness’. Nic’s understanding of human emotions, and ability to translate them into beautifully realised miniature marvels, makes him one of our most beloved artists. His art aims to raise the viewer’s spirits, and his latest works are no exception.

‘Addicted’ is one of Nic’s trademark pieces, where his ‘little people’ climb all over the words ‘Love is my Drug’, which are made from striking red pill capsules. “Love is genuinely the best drug there is, be it for your partner, your family or your friends,” says Nic. “It’s the most addictive thing.”

Nic enjoyed feeling the love for him from his collectors at the recent Birmingham ICC gallery launch of his Hands On collection. “It was a great thing, a beautiful thing,” Nic remembers. “It’s taken me a few weeks to come down from it, especially as it was a very intense year in preparing for the collection. But it’s all been great.”

Nic’s second new piece, ‘Kindness’, has been created with the eternally popular LEGO bricks, and has the slogan: “Build people up, don’t knock them down”, with his ‘little people’ building the sculpture. “LEGO brings out the child in me – it’s the best toy ever made! – and takes me back to my childhood days when my grandmother used to say: ‘If you can’t find anything good to say, don’t say anything at all’,” he says.

“I’ve tried to say that in ‘Kindness’, where the sentiment is encouraging people to build, grow and develop each other as people. Being kind to others makes you feel better, and the pieces mix the childlike world of LEGO with an important lesson that kindness is the meaning of life, and the duality of that message is very simple.”

From a young age Nic has been passionate about hand building, which developed into a career as a carpenter and furniture maker, and eventually an artist. Throughout his development into an artist, Nic still plays with LEGO, “We have a whole room of it in the studio!” he laughs. “I’ve been living out my childish LEGO fantasies out through my youngest son. I’m from the generation in the Seventies when there were no big kits, so you’d have to make your own, slightly crap, Death Star”.

“I was trying to create the things that I saw in Star Wars and stuff like that. My mum has still got picture of like my first sort of spaceships and things, and I used to name my models, which is weird. She reminded me about the other day, and the best name that everyone always remembers was this sort of boat-aeroplane thing that I called the Lord Ship Go Buggy!”