In the late summer of 2013, Wendy Nicole was two weeks away from staging her first runway show at New York Fashion Week when she got a call from Beyoncé’s stylist, Lisa Cooper.
Beyoncé had spent the previous 48 hours trying on 200 outfits for the video for her song “Drunk in Love”, Cooper said.
And they landed on a sheer black chiffon number that Nichols designed for her upcoming Spring 2014 collection.
“She was like, ‘Jay-Z is standing here telling me this is the only outfit he wants her to wear during the entire video,'” Nicole told The Post.
Beyoncé wore that dress and strutted in the ocean for the video, which would become one of her most iconic songs.
Nicole had to rush to create a duplicate of the intricate silk-tulle gown for her fashion show.
Now, what Beyoncé wore is on display in Nicole’s first visual art show, “Departing the World Once More,” running through October 27 in her studio in the Museum Building at 158 Mercer St.
“It still had some seaweed and holes in it,” Nicole said of getting the garment back from Cooper.
But he left it as is. “It definitely has some Beyoncé magic in it.”
While a handful of Nicole’s gowns and accessories — beloved by celebs like Rihanna, Zoe Kravitz, Lindsay Lohan, Claire Danes and Ilana Glazer — are on display in the show, its focus is on the paintings.
Over the past year and a half, Nicole, 52, has moved from designing clothes and jewelery to creating moody portraits of fashion models and stars like Rihanna and Julia Fox, and using her nearly naked body to put unique “imprints” on canvas Is.
To create some of the two dozen pieces featured in the show, Nicole took off the shorts and bralette, put on a Transcendental Meditation playlist, and “imprinted” herself at work. She used her shoulders to crush fruit seeds, used her feet to plant blueberries and used her hands to press essential oils onto her canvases.
“I was thinking that when I make a dress, I take the fabric and put it on my body and pin it,” she said. “I was trying to think, ‘How would I create something like this in Paint?’ So my first instinct was that I needed to make physical contact with the canvas.
She developed this method when she took a week-long painting class in Nepegue, Long Island, where she lives when she is not in her SoHo studio.
That morning, he ate oatmeal and pomegranate for breakfast and scattered the remaining seeds on a blank 12-by-6-foot canvas on the floor. Then, she said, “I just came to this.”
Later, he placed the canvas on the wall and began painting around the defined areas of the pomegranate.
“I kept walking, and then I started seeing faces,” she recalled.
Nicol titled this large abstract work “Missing Witches”.
“I think I have a certain amount of psychic knowledge of the past lives of women who have been there before,” he said. “Maybe witches and saints and teachers and women in my past or in the past of our collective consciousness showed up here through the kind of download that I was receiving.”
Nicole – not entirely surprising for a jewelry designer who loves amulets and crystals – is really interested in “psychic downloads” and “frequency” and “past lives.”
When she paints, she said, she seems to be able to capture things that happened long ago, lifetimes ago – in the energies and emotions that live in the air, or inside her.
“I’m studying past life regression,” she said. She also said that she always felt deeply connected to “something from the past”.
He added, “I always felt like my past life was like being Native American.” “I have always been fascinated by Native American culture. I have always used horse hair and feathers in my work.”
Meanwhile, a painting of Rihanna depicts the “Diamonds” singer in a cloud of smoke, while Fox is depicted as if she is giving birth in a fairy tale forest of tangled trees.
“She has the beauty and strength of an alien,” Nicole said of the city girl. “I don’t know him personally, but I know the time is coming to meet him in the future.”
