About Nicole
Nicole with her dog, Vinny, in front of one of her mother, Franyo’s, paintings.
I have had two careers, one as a portrait painter, and one as a fiction writer. In college I studied comparative literature but simultaneously managed to rack up hours in life drawing classes and studio art. In 1978 I earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University where I worked with Stanley Elkin and Rosellen Brown. My first novel, Hearts of Glass, (touted as the steamiest book of the summer by The New York Times) was released by Crown in 1992. Over the following years I focused on short stories, novellas and screenplays, and co-authored High Frequency, a spoof on new age Austin.
In 2016, I published my memoir, The World of Franyo, about my parents’ escape from Nazi Germany, my teenage years as the daughter of wealthy art collectors in 1960s New York, my high drama first marriage to well-known Czech photographer Werner Forman, and the miracle of getting sober in AA.
My serialized thriller, A Secret Grave, an art-related mystery about a disappeared healer illustrated with paintings and photos, was published on ArtProfiler in 2017 and 2018. Currently I am working on stories for a new column, Tales of the Town, and have just completed the last of six interconnected novellas.
On the painting side, in 2006, after years of renting space, I built a studio behind my house in Northwest Austin and have spent most of the time since then focusing on commissions and portraits of people whose faces interest me.
I am best known for political portraiture, and for ArtProfiler, an online cultural magazine which I helped found in 2014, acclaimed for its whacky videos, political reporting, art reviews, memes and serialized fiction.
After Trump’s election in 2016, I 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, many of which went viral on social media, earning our editorial staff furious commentary from right wing observers. In 2020, just as Covid was beginning to hit, I was asked to do a portrait of Lilly Ledbetter for a Time Magazine cover. In the months since Covid struck, I decided it was time to leave ArtProfiler and start my own website, NicoleJeffords.com, dedicated to serialized fiction, portraiture and editorial drawings.
I’m very excited about this colorful and engaging new venture, and hope you will enjoy it as much as I enjoy creating the stories and pictures that will regularly appear here -- their first stop before making their way further out into the world.
