Joanna, your recent oil paintings have all featured your wife Lilah. How many times would you say you’ve painted or represented her in some way?
Oh, countless times, honestly. Thousands of times, I feel like a duckling that’s been imprinted on. Since the beginning of 2025 she’s been part of my paintings, and although that doesn’t seem like a long time, it feels like a lifetime because her face was the first time I painted any face.
Really?
I’d done some self-portraits before but they didn’t have faces. I’m a self-taught artist so as I get better at painting and understand more, I’ve been able to work myself up more to take those big leaps… I painted Lilah’s face before I ever painted my own. It’s like, getting to know someone else and then that slowly leading to getting to know myself. It’s like learning a language and then learning to talk to yourself.
“I think life is more beautiful when someone isn’t agreeing with you all the time. That’s all reflected in the paintings.”
Do you learn something new about her each time? Or maybe you understand her more deeply with each portrait?
Yeah, absolutely. Every painting of her is different. I don’t calculate what she’s going to look like or what the finished painting will look like either, and I love to find out things about her by painting her. A friend visited my studio recently and just by walking around, she could unpick every stage of our relationship by looking at the paintings… This is when I fell in love with her, this is when we were fighting, this represents her sassy side… Sometimes I would also try to sort through emotions or even fights through painting her. But then we reconcile halfway through, it goes from angry painting to sweet painting. There are layers of anger underneath the love in some cases. But I guess that’s what life is, right? It’s ultimately positive, but it’s also not so clean cut. It’s a very human relationship and I think life is more beautiful when someone isn’t agreeing with you all the time. That’s all reflected in the paintings.
It’s an exploration in devotion, both to your work and to your partner.
I think devotion is so interesting. There’s this person I want to be with for the rest of my life, and that reminded me of the feeling I had when I couldn’t get out of painting. It was this realization that this was now my life, you’re almost stuck in it. There’s no other way of thinking, you know what I mean? I’m culturally catholic, for example, and so there’s this idea that you go back to God, and you express your love for God with adornment. And I think I’ve carried that into my paintings, like everything is about adornment. I’m adorning Lilah in my work. I’m adorning the very act of painting and I think that’s how I break down devotion.
Earlier you mentioned the layers of paint built up over the course of your process, and some of your works are painted so thickly that they almost seem to grow off the canvas. Is that what you mean by adorning the act of painting?
I used to have a great obsession with my studio, and when I was using un-stretched canvas, I used to just let my paintings bleed off the canvas onto the walls. I loved the marks of things in a space. And I think some of that came from architecture school, but mostly it was just fun to see how painting was a testament of my life. There are traces of an artist living and breathing in this space and spending the whole day there, every day. When I was preparing for my recent show at Saatchi Yates, I used some stretched canvases but then I would wipe my palette knife off or my brushes off on the sides of the frame so it sort of had this record of all the decisions I’d made. I just liked the idea of the margins having a presence as well because these are impasto paintings, you have to move around them and see them from different angles to get the best sense of them.
When did you first fall in love with the impasto technique?
I guess I’ve always been stroke heavy, and then throughout the years, it’s just been slowly getting heavier and heavier as I go; I started giving the edges of each stroke more prominence, and then a couple years ago all of a sudden, it just happened. I’ve also definitely been influenced by Lilah’s grandfather, who was also a painter from the abstract expressionist times and he would really let the paint do what it wanted… I don’t know how to put it into words really, but he really influenced me to just let go and paint even thicker. Once you get the taste for this style of painting, you never stop. I’m clearly not a perfectionist so this style works really well for me, I don’t see a painting as one big smooth seal.
You also tend to keep parts of your initial sketches and lines visible on your paintings. Is that part of your anti-perfectionist approach?
Well, I think there’s a lot of different driving points to revealing the process in a painting. The process was all I ever learned about in architecture school. It was actually never really about the finished building, ever, it was about how to deconstruct and reconstruct ideas. With painting, to me, it’s more vulnerable to let people into your process, and doing that is more honest than showing something complete. I think that in-between-ness is what’s interesting. That’s the reason why I paint. I can’t put a word to it, and so I have to leave things open ended. It’s like with Da Vinci, he would use the drawing as grounding to reality, because it’s the thing you start with, it’s the thing you go back to. It’s the thing that pushes something forward.
What was the transition like from the structure of architecture school to the more emotive world of painting?
It was natural. I was in this unit in architecture school that was very much not rectilinear. I remember my tutor was telling me, like, “You don’t have to make it like a box. It could be whatever you want.” I was like, “Okay, that’s cool. I’m going to explore space with that.” And that led me to realizing that space isn’t broken down into these Keynesian grid constructs of time and history. It just got more fluid for me. I started developing my instinct with art and painting, I started painting bigger and thicker, I gained confidence… I just started to explore more and more. Eventually I realized that I felt okay living the rest of my life eating a can of beans on the floor of my studio if it meant that I could be a painter. Painting just became my anchor. No matter what conditions I was living in or what was happening in my life, painting was the thing that I could resort to and make everything okay — even if success or nothing ever came from it.