Nicole Jeffords has had two careers, one as a portrait painter, and one as a fiction writer. In college she studied comparative literature but simultaneously managed to rack up hours in life drawing classes and studio art. In 2006, Nicole built a studio behind her house in Northwest Austin and has spent most of the time since then focusing on commissions and portraits of people whose faces interest her. She is best known for political portraiture, and for ArtProfiler, an online cultural magazine which she helped found in 2014, acclaimed for its art reviews, memes, serialized fiction and political reporting. After Trump’s election in 2016, she began — out of horror and rage — a series of paintings of Trump and his administration. The portraits were used as the basis for provocative memes, earning the ArtProfiler editorial staff furious commentary from right wing observers. In 2020, just as Covid was beginning to hit, Nicole was asked to do a portrait of Lilly Ledbetter for a Time Magazine cover. In the months since Covid struck, she decided it was time to leave ArtProfiler and start her own website, NicoleJeffords.com, dedicated to serialized fiction, portraiture and editorial drawings.

I am a fine arts painter specializing in portraiture. My work combines elements that are both classical and expressionistic, dwelling on the natural beauty of the face as well as the subject’s raw emotional energy and psychological patterns that come through as the canvas develops. For me, portraiture is a revelatory process -- a dialogue begins, slow, silent until bit by bit a picture emerges, almost as if a channel opens and the person steps forward, allowing me to see some part of them that is real and true.