Meet The Artist Behind Lily Allen’s Infamous Album Cover

Ever since the release of Lily Allen’s West End Girl, the world has become more entranced with the British star than ever. The scathing bare-all of an album details her separation from actor David Harbour with forensic precision, loudly hinting at everything from infidelity and sex addiction, to Allen’s own substance abuse and attempts at non-monogamy. It only took one listen for everybody to start streaming on repeat, analysing every moment of the Stranger Things press tour, and obsessing over the ex-couple’s New York brownstone.

Allen’s vocals and devastating lyrics aside, the album would be nothing without its iconic cover art. Nieves González’s polka-dot depiction of Lily Allen has made her a household name – and it’s been quite a thrill, she tells Olivia Cole.

Interview With Artist Nieves González

Growing up in Spain, 29-year-old painter Nieves González came of age idolising Zurbarán and Velázquez. She studied in Seville, where in the city’s sublime Museum of Fine Arts she could look at her favourite La Virgen de las Cuevas anytime she chose. She learned a lot about ‘light, drama, the Old Masters of the Baroque, and understanding how their works are constructed’.

Her work is saturated in art history yet she uses these classical compositions and Baroque moods in paintings of contemporary human figures. Through social media, that striking culture clash caught the eye of Leith Clark, creative director for Lily Allen’s new album, West End Girl, and González was asked to depict the singer-songwriter.

The resulting melancholic but powerful portrait shows Allen wearing her blue puffer jacket like a kind of armour, almost totally shrouded. The Pierrot polka dots on her coat and thigh-high boots (the bottom half of the portrait revealed on the inner sleeve) are perfect for the music’s tragicomic tone. Painted in secrecy before the album was even finished, the portrait can now be seen on the Tube, on Times Square billboards and on the phones of the millions of people streaming West End Girl.

Working from a studio in Granada, González tells me music is her near constant companion — Flamenco, rock and indie along with Las Hijas de Felipe, a Spanish podcast ‘that explores the 16th and 17th centuries through nuns and small lives. Everything that happens to you has already happened to a nun back then. It’s my passion,’ she jokes.

In fact, her favourite song on Allen’s album — Pussy Palace — ‘seems like a hymn to me’ (albeit a very modern kind of hymn too colourful to be played on the radio).

The studio complex houses a number of artists and she likes the community and chance to take a break with one another, even if it’s just a moment at the end of a day before returning to work in the evening. Outside the calm minimalist world of her studio, the past few months have been a heady emotional moment for the young artist. ‘It has been very exciting and a bit overwhelming in a good way,’ she reflects. ‘Seeing how the project reaches the world and how the image starts to live on its own is very special.’

Allen has the original painting, rolled up ready to get stretched onto canvas and onto the wall, as she heads off on tour. Meanwhile, González will next be showing her work in Bilbao at SC Gallery in February, and in June in Los Angeles. Many of her portraits are unknown models she has found, ‘because I see something in their gesture or presence that I want to paint’.

As well as Allen, she’d love to get the Andalucían music stars of her favourite playlists in her sights, such as Soleá Morente or Rocío Márquez, and wouldn’t mind adding Scarlett Johansson to her list of models. With West End Girl’s polka-dot portrait quite literally everywhere, you never know. It’s been a thrilling moment which she says still makes her hair stand on end.

Nieves González is at SC Gallery in Bilbao from 13 February (scgallery.es).