LUCY JONES

INTERVIEW FOR ORDER #03.

Anyone who grew up in the land Down Under will instantly recognise the scenes that are brought to life on Holly Greenwood’s canvases. Her hazy renditions of chaotic pub carpets and lone figures perched on bar stools are vividly nostalgic, imbuing the mundane with a surreal, dreamlike quality.

Born in Sydney to Australian film royalty (we’ll let you Google the details), Holly was destined for icon status. With a regular roster of solo exhibitions and several prestigious art prize nominations under her belt, she’s well on her way. This is Holly, in her own words.

“I’ve actually lived in Sydney my whole life. I was born at home in Surry Hills. And then when I was ten, my parents bought a property in Dungog. So that was when I started to have an interest in country towns and small pubs—just little worlds outside of what I knew, I guess.

My mum’s a painter and artist herself, and my dad’s an actor, so I kind of grew up with that around. But also, they just really gave me all the opportunities of going into whatever I was passionate about. And it was definitely film and photography I was interested in, and then I delved into painting, and painting seemed to stick for me. I loved the immediacy of painting. It was very meditative for me—I would go into another world, it would make me calm, and then I’d come out and I feel like, ‘Wow, I’ve created this.’ I found it really incredible that I could do that, and so I think that was kind of addictive.

The choice of paint, and the way in which I apply it, is to reflect the mood and the immediacy of the places that I’m in, and especially the outfits as well. I feel like you can say a lot about a person with what they’re wearing, or the way that they put their hand down on the table.

I’m very interested in mannerisms and putting that into a painting. I’ve painted in pubs across the globe—Grogan’s in Dublin, The French House in Soho, London, and in bars in the Marais in Paris—and what has always struck me is that there’s a universality to people’s behaviour, wherever they are in the world.

The show I’m working towards is continuing to explore pubs—a lot of pubs in Sydney and RSLs like the Yarra Bay Sailing Club. For me, it’s always a fascination with people in places where their guard is down, so that there’s something more authentic and real about them, and mundane as well in some way. They’re not at work; it’s this in-between place. And they don’t often know that I’m looking at them [laughs]. As soon as they do it changes.

Sometimes I don’t know why I’m so fascinated with feet and hands. It comes down to a fascination with something we can all relate to. You can know who someone is just by seeing the way they hold their hand or what shoes they’re wearing—there’s so much you can say with so little.

The reason I love painting is because it comes from your perception of what you’re seeing in the world, how you yourself interpret the world, and the immediacy of that. Once you put down a mark, it’s there, and you did that, in that time. The way that you see the world will continue to change, and you might not feel the same as you did, but when you’re painting, that’s a record of how you were at that point in time.

Before I start a show—I take photos every day and I’m always capturing things, my head’s never not thinking about things creatively in a way; it’s hard to switch it off. So I compile a whole bunch of my photographs together. Then I just come [into the studio], and I often don’t paint for a little bit. I just come in and do some priming of canvases, just to get into some kind of feeling.

And then it often happens late at night while I’m in bed, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I have an idea.’ It’s hard to describe because it kind of just comes at me and then I know that’s what I’m going to do the next day. It might be the carpet that’s going to be in the pub. Sometimes it’s a structural thing, but also what I want to evoke as well.

Something I’m probably going to be heading more towards is people doing makeup in mirrors in public places. I’m interested by people in their own little world while they’re putting on a face, and they’re doing that on a train, or in a little mirror.”