In Conversation with Holly Cecilia Smith | Beach House Art

Holly:

I think I like that outside, I’m never completely in charge.

The wind moves things, the light disappears, my paper gets damp, someone walks past and starts talking to me, or I realise I’ve been sitting in a very uncomfortable position for the last forty minutes. There isn’t really time to make everything perfect, which is probably quite good for me.

There’s also a rhythm to painting outside that has become part of the rhythm of my life. I’ve often worked other jobs alongside painting, so making work has had to find its way into the gaps, before a shift, after work, an hour between one thing and another. I might end up in the same spot at roughly the same time each week simply because that is the hour I have.

And actually, I really like that. You start to know somewhere through repetition. One week it’s full of people and dogs, the next it’s completely empty. The light moves a little further around, the path gets muddier, something flowers and then disappears again. Without really intending to, you end up watching a place move through a season.

Painting outside makes me respond rather than plan. The studio is where I can pull all of those things apart afterwards, but outside is where I’m reminded that the landscape is carrying on perfectly well without me. I suppose it gets a say in the painting too.

Holly:

I’m not sure I do choose them, really.

Sometimes a place becomes important simply because I keep passing through it. It might be on my way home from work, somewhere I can reach in the hour between shifts, or a bit of coast I run along every week. Then slowly I start noticing its little habits.

I find that much more interesting than hunting for the perfect view. I like seeing the same place on a Monday morning and then again on a Friday evening. How many people are there? How many dogs? Is the tide in? Has somebody moved that bench? Is the gorse suddenly ridiculously yellow? Sometimes the smallest change is the thing that makes me want to paint it.

Walking is a huge part of how I make work too. I like journeys and I like taking the long way around. I’m the sort of person who will drive an extra fifteen minutes because I know somewhere nicer to eat my packed lunch. Slowing things down gives me enough time to actually notice where I am.

So I think the places I paint are often just the ones I’ve spent enough time with for them to become familiar, but not so familiar that they stop surprising me.

Holly:

Cornwall is very good at ruining your plans.

You can leave the house in sunshine and twenty minutes later be horizontal in the wind wondering why you didn’t bring a coat. I actually really like that unpredictability.

Because I return to the same places quite often, I notice the changes more. A route I ran all summer at seven in the evening suddenly has to happen in the dark. A beach that was heaving with people a few weeks ago is empty. The same patch of sea can be bright blue one day and almost grey the next.

I think that repetition has made me less interested in trying to pin a landscape down exactly as it looks at one particular moment. I know it won't look like that for very long anyway.

Instead, I paint what seems to remain after spending time there. Sometimes that’s a colour or a line, sometimes it’s more like the memory of weather. I like that a painting can hold several visits at once, Tuesday’s sky, Friday’s sea, the colour I noticed while running there three weeks ago, rather than pretending the landscape politely stayed still for me.

Holly:

I’ve always drawn, but movement has probably shaped my work more than any particular artist or painting has.

Growing up, I was constantly drawing in notebooks, in cars, on journeys, wherever I happened to be, and I became quite interested in what happens to a line when you stop trying to control it. I still think there’s something of that in the way I paint now.

Since then I’ve lived, travelled and worked in quite a few different places, and I’ve rarely had a life where being an artist happens neatly from nine until five. I’ve worked in cafés, kitchens and various other jobs alongside painting, and for a long time I thought all of that was the time around my practice. Now I’m not sure it is.

Quite a lot of the work happens because I’m moving between things. Walking to work, running after a shift, swimming, driving somewhere, noticing the same hill every morning. My body is occupied with going forwards and my brain gets to float around a bit. That’s often when an idea turns up.

I was recently awarded an Emerging Artist Bursary from St Ives School of Painting, which gave me the chance to experiment with acrylic inks and loosen things up again. I think that’s something I’m always chasing in the work: how to hold onto instinct and play without over-explaining what I’m doing.

So I don’t think there was one big defining moment. It’s probably the accumulation of hundreds of small ones, places I’ve lived, jobs I’ve worked, people I’ve met, paths I’ve walked repeatedly, weather I’ve been caught in, paintings that went completely wrong and occasionally one that surprised me.

Holly:

I return to St Ives a lot. I have family ties there, so there’s a familiarity to it for me, but I’m also endlessly interested in the art history of the place and the strange feeling of walking around a landscape that so many artists have looked at before you.

I love how walkable it is too. You can move from little streets and studios to the harbour, out towards the beaches and suddenly onto the coast path, and I think that way of experiencing a place on foot really suits how I look at things. I like noticing the shifts that happen when you keep returning rather than arriving somewhere once in search of a view.

Then there’s the land around Wheal Coates and St Agnes Head, which I’m drawn back to for almost the opposite reason. It feels wonderfully wild and exposed up there. I love running those paths, the old mine workings, the cliffs, the sea appearing and disappearing, and the weather usually having quite a lot to say about the whole thing.

I think I need both. Places that hold familiarity and history, and places that make me feel very small and slightly windswept. Both seem to find their way into the paintings eventually.

Holly:

I think this is the lovely bit, because once a painting leaves me I don’t really get to decide anymore.

Something I painted because I’d passed it every Tuesday between shifts might remind somebody else of a completely different place. A colour might feel like a childhood holiday, a coastline they know, a swim they once had, or simply somewhere they’d rather be on a Tuesday morning.

I don’t particularly want someone to look at one of my paintings and understand exactly what I was thinking. I’d rather leave a little space for them.

So much of making the work is really just practising paying attention, noticing how somewhere changes, returning to it, looking again. If living with one of my paintings makes someone pause occasionally and do a little of that too, I think I’d be very happy.