Nicholas de Lacy-Brown
Spotlight of the Month
Law & Art presents art made by lawyers from around the world, and turns the spotlight on one new lawyer artist each month. This November, discover the work of Nicholas de Lacy Brown, commercial technology lawyer in London at DLA Piper by day, and artist by night.
Nicholas' Story
Nicholas de Lacy-Brown is a commercial and technology lawyer at DLA Piper specialising in public procurement, privacy law and complex technology sourcing transactions. In his spare time, he is very much an artist, filling his time with an almost all-encompassing passion for all things design, craft, illustration and painting. Nicholas was never trained in art, but started painting, as if on instinct, from a young age, completing a set of 37 paintings of each of Shakespeare’s plays at the age of 13.
While keeping art in the side-lines owing to a busy legal career in both the public and private sector, Nicholas has had a degree of professional success. In 2009, he was awarded the International Young Artist’s prize at the International Festival of Art in Marbella with a subsequent solo show at the exclusive Marbella Club Hotel. Subsequently, he has exhibited at London’s Bankside Gallery, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Strand Gallery (solo exhibition - When (S)pain became the Norm, 2014), the prestigious Cork Street in Mayfair (solo exhibition – Sebastian’s Arrow’s, 2008) and most recently at the Mall Gallery where he was a finalist in the Royal Society Of Portrait Painter’s annual competition in 2020.
His works inspired by Van Gogh formed part of a showcase at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and a subsequent touring show in Beijing, and his prints are held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Describing art as his ultimate form of escapism, Nicholas’ work fluctuates between the figurative and the abstract, but all of his works are characterised by a strong sense of colour, balanced composition, and a strong instinct for representation and story-telling. His preferred medium is acrylic (because of its speed), gouache (because it can be packed away in a suitcase for paintings-on-the-go) and oil paints (for more elaborate, slower projects).
