Lights, camera, don't move! The new wave of English still-life painters
In the final feature of a five-part series of the new school of English painting, Charlotte Mullins meets the artists standing still.
The most surprising genre of painting to be attracting sustained interest from England’s contemporary artists today is still life. From the soft-focus mimosa of Paul Winstanley (b. 1954) to the strange objects that pepper the abstracted interiors of 2025 John Moores Painting Prize winner Ally Fallon (b. 1998), the genre is making a comeback.
Fallon lives and works in Manchester. He studied at the city’s School of Art and Apollo Painting School programme. One of Apollo’s co-founders is Louise Giovanelli (b. 1993). Her own paintings of shimmering satin shirts and soft drapes reflect her interest in depicting how light falls on surfaces and how this can be reproduced in painting.
Clare Woods specialises in still lifes in oil on aluminium, such as 'The Maintainer'.
Further west is the Hereford studio of Clare Woods (b. 1972), where still lifes form an increasing proportion of her work. She paints fast, in oil on aluminium, depicting everything from floral displays and fronds of blossom — a selection of which will be on display at a forthcoming exhibition, ‘Clare Woods: Garden Without Seasons’ at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (until November 8) — to glittering chandeliers and sherry trifles. Her rich colours wriggle and writhe across the surface, offering a painterly response to nature morte, but also — simultaneously — a transformation of the subject into a melange of abstract brushstrokes.
Perhaps the rise in popularity of still life is because it allows artists to question the relationship between the reproduced image and the real thing. In an uncanny parallel of our world of deep fakes and falsified truths, these simulacra of the things that surround us teeter on the edge of entropy. How fitting.
This is the final part of our five-part series on the new school of English painting. They will be published every Thursday afternoon throughout September.
Click here to read part one on the new abstract painters, part two on the new figurative painters, part three on historical painters and part four on landscape painters.
