The Art Five is an ongoing interview series by Hannah Payne Art, featuring conversations with artists, curators and collectors. In Issue 24, we spoke to Eleanor May Watson ahead of her solo exhibition Vibrant Life at Benjamin Parsons X Hannah Payne in Oxford.
October 2022
Q1.This new body of work in Vibrant Life sees a shift in focus from the more spacial architectural interior studies within previous work, to more gestural and close up observations of still life subjects. Can you tell us about this move and was it conscious?
Still life as a subject has really opened new possibilities for me. Firstly, the close spatial relationship to the picture plain is interesting. There is also a lot of licence to play; once there is a sense of what you are looking at, everything can fizz and shift around that.
I have been searching for ways in which to make my practice more inventive and curious, both in how I make work and hopefully in the resulting paintings.
The genre of still life is so packed with references that I found that I was able to embrace a freer mode of mark-making and begin to build images in a more surprising (at least for me) way. Meanwhile embracing the many layered interpretations of the genre itself.
Q2. Tell us about your studio move, having moved in the past year from London to the Kent countryside, how has this impacted your practice?
It has affected my work enormously. The studio is at the bottom of the garden, working at home has made life and work feel more intertwined and intimately linked. My paintings have become much more inward looking and less self conscious somehow; the subject matter, colour and gesture is warmer. Moving towards a more personal expression.
I find the quiet shelter of my world here helpful in taking leaps in how and what I am making. There is less background noise crackling whilst I am working - be it the very real noise of living in a City or the imagined (largely self-) critical noise of working in such a saturated space.
Q3. The new series includes oil paintings in a distinct variation of scales, sometimes with the same subject explored. What is your interest in scale within still life painting?
I think scale has everything to do with our bodily and imaginative response to the work.
You can easily hold the small works in this show in one hand, and scan the entire surface quickly with your eyes. There is a wholeness to how you experience these; all the moments of colour, gesture, light and paint are almost simultaneous. They feel intimate like reading a hand-written letter.
Whereas the largest piece in this show allows you to be more enveloped, you scan the surface as a series of moments which add together to make a whole. The scale of the still life is enlarged, but the ‘detail’ is not necessarily greater.
Q4. One of the most striking observation of the works in Vibrant Life is the rich use of colour, it's joyous and luscious, reflecting, perhaps, an important and deeply personal phase in your practice. Can you talk about that?
Yes! It has not been an entirely conscious shift but I intended for my paintings to be more personal and allow for more vulnerability. There have been a number of catalysts to this - firstly a sustained period of therapy gave me new tools to sit with uncertainty in many ways. It also taught me a great deal about non-judgemental curiosity and self-acceptance. Changing my perspective, I hope permanently. Its something for which I am enormously grateful.
As we have already touched on, moving my studio home means the studio is a deeply private and personal space which has given me more scope… Meanwhile, my subject matter also turned to my own life.
My current pregnancy has given me a new impetus to readdress my relationship with my art practice, my sense of self, and the wider world. The title of the show - ‘Vibrant Life’ - really came from this very special time of creative intensity and an enormous feeling of gratitude.
Q5. Landscape is an important influence for you ,and you have mentioned an interest in the work of artists including Breugel, Cezanne, Paul Klee, Ivon Hitchens, and Cecily Brown whilst making this new body of work. What is it about these artists that inspires you?
I think a lot of what I have been thinking about in making these works is a more expansive space beyond the subject matter. Hopefully, an emotional landscape as well as a physical or spatial one. That the world of the painting can be both a cropped section of a the usual ephemera of still life as well as the painted surface, juggling forces of light, shadow, colour and gesture.
With thanks to Eleanor May Watson.
© THE ART FIVE 2026.
