Interior Design

In Conversation With Lottie Cole

In this month’s edition of In Conversation With, we sat down with Lottie Cole, an artist we’ve worked with on many projects and who is celebrated for her richly detailed, character-filled domestic worlds.

Renowned Interiors Artist

How would you describe the style of your paintings and where does your inspiration come from?

I think my style is "English" and unhelpfully I can't really pin it down much more than that. I don't feel I've signed up to a particular style. But the artists I love like Winifred Nicholson just painted as they did and, to my mind, didn't worry too much about what everyone else was doing.

I've always loved interiors and art. I think I've filed most rooms I've been in away in my mind to be retrieved at a later date. But I do spend too much time on instagram, reading magazines and interior books. My absolute favourite thing is single owner auction catalogues where there are pictures of the house and contents together. I treasure my Bunny Mellon Sotheby's sale catalogue, but I only have two of the four volumes. So I'm always looking out for the other two

What story do you want your art to tell?

I like the sense that my paintings can allow a narrative. I still put under recognised women artists works in my pictures. But my recent work has been inspired by lines of poetry. While I have the line or the story I'm thinking about when I'm painting them, I hope that people can bring their own ideas too.

I try to evoke a mood and distill a sense of a common feeling of memory - some kind of shared common experience. I hope they nudge at the door of something the viewer remembers

Do you have a favourite Salvesen Graham room?

My absolute favourite is the Pied-à-terre apartment. It's an area I would love to live in and the way SG made the whole interior feel both fresh and layered was really masterful. I loved the use of paintings & ceramics. But it's very hard to narrow it down to one scheme.

If you could paint any historic house or interior, which would you choose and why?

I loved doing my paintings of Monk's House & Charleston Farmhouse. It was an intense infatuation and it allowed me to really appreciate the interiors at a deep level. I found it hard to find other similar interiors which is why I started coming up with my own.

I'm currently trying to paint Bowen's Court, which is a house in Ireland which no longer exists and belonged to the writer Elizabeth Bowen. I visited nearby Doneraile Court, which is very beautiful and of a similar scale to help me get the feel of the spaces. It was the home of the St. Leger family and currently houses the Bowen material which is normally at Crawford Art Centre in Cork.

What do you look for in selecting the right frame for a piece of art?

A good framer, a frame can totally make or break a picture. I go to Chris Everett in Wandsworth even though I now live in Sussex I'm still sending him my work to frame. He's hugely knowledgeable and makes great suggestions.

For works under glass I always go for UV non reflective art glass AR70, it's considerably more expensive but it protects the paintings from UV and because of the non-reflection you don't even realise it's there and can always see the image.

You often paint with watercolour & gouache - What is it about gouache that suits your storytelling so well?

Love the fact that the gouache gives you much more freedom when you've made a mistake as you can go over an area in much the same way as oil painting. Also combining with watercolour you can have areas of transparency and opacity so it lends more life to the finished painting.

What is your thought process when working with colour, and how do you decide when to introduce unexpected choices? Which artists, past or present, have influenced you the most?

One of my artistic heroines is the painter Agnes Martin. Her work is minimalist and abstract, opposite to my own. But, I admire her for trying to get to the essence of things. Despite trying to restrict my palette I find in the end colour wins out. I'm conscious that I'm making a painting though not something real. The blue-haired children just felt right, they weren't meant to be portraits of real people, and I felt the blue made them more "available" for people to connect with them and surprisingly blue began to feel natural.
I love genre painters. Wilkie, Hogarth, Vermeer. Paintings which invite you into a whole world. Also Northern Renaissance painters, Robert Campin etc. It's all the real details and the fact that when they were painted they would have been spoken so directly to the contemporary viewers.

Are there recurring symbols or motifs in your work that hold personal significance?

I often include blackbirds, in Japan the Blackbird was identified with the God Izanagi and was considered to aid and direct the souls to paradise or their future incarnation. They were thought to be good luck indicators, though I know not their meaning in all cultures. I also often put in the Turkey Oak tree which is outside my kitchen. It's almost cartoon like in it's tree-ness.