Artist Bio

Born in Melbourne in 1952, Nick began work in 1970 as a Trainee Commercial Artist with Kodak (Australia) Pty. Ltd., in Coburg, and completed a Diploma of Art at Phillip Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1978. After a few more years working as a Graphic Designer, he began teaching in the Secondary School system in 1984, and completed a Graduate Diploma of Education at The University of Melbourne in 1985, which was followed by a Graduate Certificate of Education (Technology Education), also at The University of Melbourne, in 1997.

Over the past four decades, Nick has been a teacher of Visual Arts and Design. Nick has always thought the teaching of creativity in its many forms, is vital to a student’s development, and he believes this should be encouraged and nurtured throughout a student’s whole education.   

During his working life as a teacher, Nick has maintained a constant interest in the visual arts and has completed many works, as the process of art-making remained important to him. These days, Nick is considered a realist painter, however, he also works in a number of different mediums. Over the years, he has been involved in a number of group shows, including exhibitions at the Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, where he was a winner of the Darebin Art Prize in 2010, with a portrait of the writer Christos Tsiolkas. Nick retired from full-time teaching at the end of 2013, to pursue life as a practicing artist.

After completing a number of commissions, Nick has built a reputation for his portraiture work over the past fifteen years. Recently though, he has taken a new direction in his work where he is focusing on the human anatomy.

Artist Statement

Depictions of the heart have been recorded throughout history; as far back as the Egyptian art of c.1300 BC, where the heart was represented as a symbol of the soul at the end of life. As a child brought up in the Catholic tradition, Nick Stella was surrounded by religious iconography that often displayed the Sacred Heart of Jesus or the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Nick also admired the beautiful anatomical studies of the heart by Leonardo da Vinci, which were produced at the height of the Renaissance. Nick considers these anatomical studies to be art works in themselves.

For some time now, Nick has wanted to do a series of works based on images associated with the heart, as his sister Anna-Maria passed away from a heart condition and he wanted to commemorate her life, by producing a body of work in her honour. Anna would have turned seventy in February of this year.

Initially Nick’s project started as exploration studies, inspired by Da Vinci’s detailed sketches, which he admired a few years earlier at an exhibition in London. He first produced a set of three drawings, which were based on studies of a sheep heart. This led to further exploration of human heart images, some of which were kindly donated by Dr. Levent Efe; artist and medical illustrator.