Monica Cecilie Nilsen lives in Langesund, a small coastal town in southern Norway. Here she has her studio and it is where her artistic journey started in summer of 2019.

In her youth she used to draw and loved to be with horses, being a horse groomer and also working at a trotting horse stable for years. As she got older and started family life, horses and art were left behind. Years later, after completing her bachelor’s degrees in ecology and nature conservation in 2015, she had got a taste for drawing again after completing some small botanical studies. Unfortunately, finding a job in the nature field was hard so she took a job as a survey-engineer instead.

The grief and frustration of having to settle with a lesser job sparked her to start drawing and painting with a strong purpose and to learn to draw realistically.  After taking an art class in acrylic painting she was eager to try all kinds of mediums, and soon realized that solely drawing realistically bored her. She got bolder and looser in her style, drawing and painting every day and over and over again horses were her subjects. After sharing her art on Instagram, in September 2020 she was invited to be a part of Paard Verzameld Collective, a Gallery and a group of equine-artist from all over the world. From that time on she continued making equine art and has just started selling paintings in Norway and abroad.

She is now working on her body of work/series for her first solo show in her home town at Galleri PoP in Langesund in april 2022.