Smash hit

Wheatley’s vision is for Perfect Circle to support young artists while they find their feet. Instead of working in a bar or on a building site to pay the rent, they can work in a job they were trained for while expanding their painterly skills. “There are people who have started at the bottom of the studio and come through the whole studio system who are successful artists now. We are still sponsoring their shows and keeping an eye on them,” says Wheatley.

Of course, the superstars of the Renaissance were never obliged to match their masterpieces to “mood boards” or swatches of curtain fabric. Wheatley is usually briefed by an interior design team, and given precise specifications to work within. A recent contract was a series of abstract canvases that incorporated the branded colours of a budget hotel chain while cleverly complementing the cushions in the lobby. Abstracts and Impressionist-style landscapes are the most used artworks for the hospitality industry, because they are least likely to give offence. “You can’t use a religious theme, it can’t be too female-oriented and you have to be careful with nudes,” says Joanna Parker of leading interior design company Parker Liddell.

Parker, who commissions Perfect Circle regularly to “channel” Impressionist artists for hotel bedrooms, actually has a series of Wheatley’s charcoals hanging in her own home. “Nichol is very creative with a great sense of fun and he does very well in the

marketplace he specialises in,” she says. “He also does very interesting work for one-off clients – beautiful sculpture and bespoke pictures.” As with any business, you get what you pay for, and one-off commissions for private clients cost anything up to £20,000, depending on the work involved. The team spent several weeks lying on their backs like Michelangelo painting murals on the dome of St Aloysius Church in Glasgow. They also produce accomplished copies of Old Masters, obtaining a special substance from France (fake 17th-century dirt) which can be massaged into paintings to create an instant ageing effect. Using hairdryers, the team do a mean craquelure – the lacework of fine cracks that appears on old paintings as the varnish or paint shrinks over the centuries. None of this is illegal, because Wheatley is not attempting to pass the works off as original.

Wheatley now describes himself as a luxury goods manufacturer rather than an artist, but he started out at the famous Glasgow School of Art. By the time he graduated in 1993 he was already disillusioned with the art world, and drifted into a series of temporary jobs including barman, bouncer, blacksmith and builder. It was while working on the building site of a new tapas bar in 1998 that he overheard the architect and designer discussing plans for a large canvas of a bullfight. “I’ll do it,” he piped up. He brought in drawings, got the job and never looked back.

Now married with two children, he cuts a popular and paternalistic figure on the Scottish art scene – not least because so many struggling artists have passed through his studio. True to the spirit of the Renaissance, Wheatley now has his first official apprentice in the form of puppyish Matthew Burns, who is the son of well-known Scottish artist Gerard Burns. He sees his apprenticeship as an alternative to art school, with the added attraction of a small salary.

“I earn a wage as the studio dogsbody but once a week I’ll have an afternoon with Nichol learning craft with the pencil, charcoal, paint, acrylic and oils. I’ll learn a new trade over the course of three or four years and I am thoroughly enjoying it.”

But Burns does not see Perfect Circle as merely a means to an end. “I absolutely love the place. When I arrived it blew me away,” he says. “It’s a sort of loft – a bit Andy Warhol – it’s very cool. A lot of people in Glasgow are jealous – when they hear me talk about Perfect Circle, or Nichol Wheatley, they go, ‘You work there? Brilliant! Tell us what it’s like.’”

The work doesn’t suit everyone. Ex-employee David Caldwell found painting-to-order particularly hard to cope with. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say soul-destroying, but if painting is precious to you and you turn it into this it can be quite difficult to shift the mindset.” He felt that working in the studio obscured his own artistic vision: “Ultimately that’s why I stopped doing it – it was too difficult to have the two things going on.” Caldwell, who worked for Wheatley between 2000 and 2004, has won awards and exhibited in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast and London. He concedes that working at Perfect Circle had some positive effects. “If you’re working with paint every day then you become less precious about it – it probably sped me up in my own work and made me get my hands dirty quicker.” He jokes that he still sometimes comes “crawling back” to see if there’s any work. “Nichol has been good to me,” he says. “It’s nice just to come back and see what’s going on in the studio.”