The Artist behind the work

PART ONE - ABOUT ME

To stand the test of time.

People have been making art since the dawn of humanity, yet works are constantly being lost, forgotten, rediscovered and brought back into the world. I love that idea — that something made by one person, at one particular moment, can outlive them and continue to connect with people generations later.

When I’m gone, my paintings will remain as little pieces of my life — records of what I saw, felt, and experienced. If they can continue to bring someone joy, curiosity or a moment of stillness long after I’m gone, then perhaps some small part of what I put into them can keep travelling forward.

After falling in love with Impressionism, I became fascinated by the idea that a painting could capture not just what a place looked like, but what it felt to be there. I love when a painting has that power to transport us somewhere else.

My mission is to build a lifelong practice as an artist who expresses authentic experiences of the world. I commit to mastering my craft so that I can translate those experiences precisely and skillfully.

The work

My paintings grow out of my experiences, observations and imagination. Sometimes they begin with a place I have travelled to or a moment that has stayed with me. Other times, an idea simply catches my attention and I want to see where it might lead. I draw from whatever sparks my curiosity — photographs, sketches and memory. I want to capture something of a place’s atmosphere, character and feeling, whether it exists in the world around me or begins entirely in my imagination. Even when imagined, I want these places to feel believable and lived in.

Over time, I’ve learnt to trust my own curiosity and intuition. Sometimes I know exactly what I want a painting to become; other times, I begin with little more than an idea and discover the painting as I work.

The scenes begin with photographs, sketches and experiences from places I have encountered,   alongside carefully selected references. Layer by layer, I work towards a surface with depth, texture and colour, allowing the image to gradually emerge.

A painting may begin as a compositional challenge that I set myself to solve, and then become an exploration of colour. I work with accidents. I paint over mistakes, allowing new layers to change what came before.

The photographs and references provide a foundation, but as I work, the paintings become increasingly imaginative, shaped by colour, memory, instinct and accident. Parts become exaggerated, abstracted and obscured — until the painting becomes something of its own.

Influences come from all over, but I deliberately avoid using or studying AI-generated imagery. I want the work to remain rooted in human experience — in things I have seen, places I have been, things I have imagined and the physical process of making.

If you’re reading this, firstly, congratulations — you are hereby invited to the OG fan club. Secondly, I hope you enjoy this journey through my life and art.

Why It Matters to Me

For me, art has saved my life more than once. 

Creating has taught me to value my dreams and experiences. Sometimes, painting feels almost spiritual. I enter a state of flow where the outside world seems to disappear, and it feels as though I’m tapping into something larger than myself.

I want that feeling to bring something good with it: joy, love, peace, curiosity, or simply a moment of stillness.

I have experienced what it feels like to see someone genuinely lose themselves in a painting — to watch their eyes move across the surface, to see them stop talking for a moment and simply look.  

I take pride knowing my work sits carefully in other people’s homes, embellishing their lives and channeling the same joyous energy I felt when making it. .

Not simply something beautiful to hang on a wall, but something they can return to. I believe a successful painting should hold your attention day after day.

Why I Paint

Art has sunk its teeth into my soul.

The discomfort of not creating follows me everywhere. I can’t go on holiday or have a massage without some part of my brain thinking about painting. There is an almost ridiculous satisfaction that comes from making something and watching it slowly become what you imagined — or occasionally become something better.

It can feel like using the Force, or stumbling into enlightenment. I get a little hit when the pieces align, and another when somebody else connects with what I have made.

I struggle to imagine my life without it.

In the footsteps of the artists who have shaped my development and spurred my dreams, I want to reach old age knowing that my work is hung in rooms across the world and that I've had a positive impact on our shared home.

Outside of painting, I practice Hawaiian Hula and Tahitian Ori, alongside Buddhist and yogic practices. Although very different from painting, they have all taught me something about breath, the body, attention, culture, community, and our relationship with the world around us.

These experiences have brought me a great deal of joy, and I want some of that joy to find its way into my paintings. A vision of peace we can all share.

One example is Chickens of Wat Umong, painted after visiting a temple in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I connected with the temple, my guide, the chickens and the local community while I was there. Later, painting the experience gave me another opportunity to connect with it.

Then, at the Art Fair, the painting found a collector. She discovered a sense of joy in the chickens depicted in the painting, appreciated the abstractions and entered the space within it. For me, it felt like a full-circle journey of love for the world. 

That exchange — from place, to artist, to painting, to another person — is one of the things that makes art extraordinary to me.

PART TWO - The Journey

It has taken a long journey to get here.

If you’re curious about how I ended up in this studio, making these paintings, the story begins somewhere rather less obvious.

Early Years

Looking back, I don’t think anyone would have predicted I'd become an artist.

“We don’t know what Holly will do in the future, but they’ll certainly do something.” Teachers would often say. My parents loved repeating it.

I was far more interested in watching television, dancing around the room and making daisy chains than doing anything I considered schoolwork. I was a scruffy little thing without much care in the world, yet art slowly became the constant thread running through my life.

To the exasperation of my teachers, I was labelled a ‘classroom disturbance’, usually late, predictably messy, forever questioning rules. A joker although typically unfunny, I felt deeply misunderstood, trapped in more ways than one.

Teen Angst 

As I grew older, I fell in love with video games, specifically creative-led games, where I would spend hours upon hours meticulously designing worlds in Minecraft; immersing myself in cultures and architecture from around the world; ornate Japanese temples, Greek pantheons and mountainous landscapes. 

I would watch anime and then spend hours reconstructing scenes from Naruto, Attack On Titan, as well as scenes from Studio Ghibli, not realising at the time that I was teaching myself a process of working with reference images and finding creative direction. I had discovered a love of my own labour. 

Yet at the same time, to my peers, family and teachers, I seemed unproductive, a gamer with unclear prospects. I wasn’t focused on becoming an artist, and from the outside, I seemed to be wasting valuable learning time. I usually managed to scrape acceptable grades, enough to keep everyone guessing. But underneath I was directionless.

I was carrying a lot more emotionally than the people around me were aware. I was living in survival mode, driven by overwhelming shame — often depressed, at my lowest, constantly considering giving up. I managed to hide it well. At the time, I wasn’t thinking years ahead—I was simply trying to get through each day.

I found that outside of my virtual worlds, there was one other place I felt in control: sitting at the top of the school, the art rooms. It smelled of acrylic paint, its shelves lined with rows of paint pots and racks of drying work. It was quiet, safe, and regularly patrolled by teachers. It was here that I would meet my first proper mentor, Mrs Palitza.

 

Mrs Palitza

Mrs Palitza had an aura that could command a battalion. She had a glare that could get people to focus in seconds. This wasn’t a room I was allowed to get idly distracted in. 

She would introduce us to fascinating artists like Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, whose  sculptures capture exaggerated, grimacing faces. Without  a hint of embarrassment Mrs Palitza would pull her face into similar expressions, I found this profoundly empowering.

Mrs Palitza sat down with me and began asking questions about who I was, what I wanted to become, and what I was trying to say through my work. For one of the first times I felt accepted enough to share.

She urged me to put myself and my body at the forefront of my work. At the time,  I didn’t understand how profound this change in attention would be, but through my artworks I began confronting my body dysmorphia. It was uncomfortably raw, yet powerful.

I would go on to fill page after page with paintings, prints and drawings of my body and mind, beginning to dissect my anatomy, gesture and form.

So I went to Art School.

As I started to get more serious about art, I became enamoured with different artists and artworks from across the world and throughout history: the hyper-lavish Rococo, the storytelling and gesture of animation, paintings with such technical mastery that I couldn’t comprehend how they had been made.

I wasn’t particularly concerned with originality. I wanted to understand how they made things that seemed so otherworldly beautiful. The obvious problem was that my hands couldn’t keep up with my eyes. Looking back, this gap was useful; it gave me something to aspire to.

I continued my studies at the University of Chichester. For the next three years, I would study art as my sole discipline, become a master of my craft, and rule the world—or so I thought.

Sometimes life throws a curveball. COVID-19 hit, my campus was moved, courses were cut, and the experience became very different from what I had imagined. I didn’t get as much done as I had hoped, and I wasn’t particularly happy there. Looking back, though, I came away with some things I still use today: practical skills like building stretchers and stretching canvas, alongside a deeper understanding of art history and critical theory.

More importantly, I began to realise how difficult it actually was to build a life as an artist. Artists would come in to give talks about their careers that often seemed dispassionate, filled with lost hopes and borrowed dreams. One artist admitted they had been making work for years without earning enough to live on. 

For the first time, I began to seriously question whether I could actually make a life as an artist.

Wake up

I wish I could say I powered on through and everything was smooth sailing from there, but leaving an art degree felt less like graduating and more like being kicked out the door, landing on your ass with a quick “Good Luck!” before it slammed shut behind you. An artistic career requires a lot of building, and for all I had been through, it didn’t seem plausible. I didn’t know where to begin.

So after months of job hunting, I finally got a job at ITSU. It was fast-paced, repetitive work. “Work faster Holly. Clean your section Holly. I need you to come in on Saturday.”

The Maki machines would hurt my fingers and I would go home smelling of fish. 

Every now and then, someone would ask if I was still painting. I wasn’t. 

The sense of responsibility to myself would only grow, imagining what could have been, what could still be. I felt like a failure, like my life was already over before it had a chance to begin, and that shame kept me stuck. Eventually, the discomfort of not trying became greater than the fear of failing. No one was coming to save me.

I turned to YouTube for answers. What was I doing wrong? I wasn’t putting myself out there. I had a rudimentary understanding of the fundamentals. I wasn’t taking risks. I hadn’t really tried. These were truths that cut deep.

A New Hope

I was going to give myself the education I had originally wanted. I began by organising the artistic fundamentals — anatomy, perspective, composition, gesture, rendering, colour, storytelling, texture — alongside the business skills needed to make a career of it. Each would be explored one by one, drawing from different sources, artists and teachers. My goal was simple, albeit time-consuming: to build a personal database I could actually return to. All too often, an important insight would be lost or forgotten before it had a chance to become automatic.

Proko’s Anatomy course took over my life. Bones would come first, followed by the origins and insertions of the muscles, across the entirety of the human body. Proko taught me how to see beyond the surface, utilising a kind of mental X-ray vision. During lunch breaks I would sketch muscles, in the evenings type up notes, skipping game time and cancelling other projects. My commutes would be filled with podcasts and artist talks. My fuel was the knowledge that this work would have to be done at some point — the earlier the better. 

The more I studied, the less talent felt like magic and the more it resembled accumulated knowledge.

This course, along with others, taught me to look beyond appearance — to understand the structures, forces and decisions that create what I see. Today, my practice still involves the study of anatomy, when drawing birds for instance — I draw focused sketches of the bones and muscles, technical studies of pattern, overlays of gestural movement.

 This would become a core belief: artistic talent can open the door, but knowledge and understanding enable you to actually go places.

I went from service job to service job while polishing these skills, until I eventually volunteered to help support The Wimbledon Art Fair.

Cheekily, I used this opportunity as a way of inspecting the various studio spaces and started dreaming again. My family urged me to at least try, so a month later, in May 2024, I got the keys to my first studio in blue building 416, a small corner room with a big window and plenty of storage. 

On the outside, it probably didn’t seem like much. I've been inside bigger bathrooms, but it gave me a different headspace to approach my art and I fell deeply in love with my new room.

Into the World

The Wimbledon Art Fair gave me a way of putting my work in front of people.

The feedback was invaluable.

With each fair, I began to understand what I felt was working, what people responded to, what might sell and what still needed development. More importantly, I began connecting with people outside of myself.

I discovered that the satisfaction of creating something beautiful was only part of the story. The work itself could have a powerful inpact in another person’s life.

I witnessed something that still feels like magic: a painting could grab hold of someone’s mind, inviting them to glide over every mark and lose themselves in thought.

“There’s just something unexplainable about it.”

Not everyone would have that reaction, and that was okay.

It was almost as if the paintings chose their owners. Seeing a painting every day can change how someone feels about themselves, their home and the world around them.

It becomes more than an artwork.

It becomes somewhere to go.

And that is what I’m going to build.

Where I’m Going

I'm only just getting started.

I want to keep developing my practice through new challenges: attempting new media, techniques and materials — my work will be full of new surprises

I want to keep learning. Keep painting. Keep taking risks. Keep setting challenges.

I understand that collecting art involves trust. For those who choose to collect my work, I want to build a career worthy of that trust — while keeping part of my work accessible and ambitious.

I’ve learnt not to be concerned with creating a singular magnum opus, but to enjoy the journey of creation and appreciate each painting as a stepping stone to the next. 

I don’t know exactly where this will lead. But I know I’m going, and I hope you’ll get to experience the full body of my work.