Charlotte Houlihan

Working from life has always been important, there’s a tension you can feel while you’re painting and I enjoy losing myself in the unpredictability of a painting put together in the moment. I am interested in character and personality. Most typically this feels related to people, but sometimes the character of an object or plant captures my attention. I try to paint the things I notice, individuality and imperfections; often in the context of interrelationships - a pose, a space, an arrangement. I love the process of translating three dimensions to two and increasingly relationships between shapes and colours on the surface vie for my attention alongside the subject itself. I want these interests to coexist, hoping to draw the viewer’s gaze to both, perhaps in a specific order - I enjoy the idea of discovery in a painting and try to create a situation where the viewer has to work to find the literal elements. I work from sketches and studies, often made while I teach, later translating them into collages and paintings, where I may fuse ideas, distort or manipulate them. Happily disrupting all of this is the paint itself. I like to let it lead me, working spontaneously and rapidly, often getting lost before finding my way out. Colour is a joyful indulgence and the resulting pieces may be playful, agitated or both.

Motherhood, and indeed parenthood has a strange way of shaping your life in unpredictable ways. As my children have been failed by traditional schooling so I have found myself becoming their advocate, educational facilitator and a sort of SEND system acrobat; a role I was not anticipating and one that I have had to learn on the job. Although this has created a great many challenges, it has also forced me to focus and adapt my work to fit in alongside broader life. I really believe that limitations can be opportunities and I have certainly felt that restriction has forced a more creative mindset in how I approach finding time to make work, and indeed how I go about making the work.

Learning about neurodivergence has also been a baptism of fire, but one that I have found hugely enlightening, and that perhaps explains my own fascination with people and how I continue to return to them as a subject to explore in paint. 

Before becoming a mother I worked in a design. After graduating with a Furniture and Product Design degree from Ravensbourne in 2000 I fell into designing stationery products - primarily invitations. For ten years I ran a small business doing this. However, I always painted and drew alongside, almost as an antidote to the commercial demands of designing, and with the longterm goal of one day branching out as an artist, perhaps even doing an MA (that particular goal still lingers). In many ways the children liberated me from a job that I did not love and permitted me to rethink and refocus on what I probably should have pursued in the first place. There was a good five or six year gap when not much happened, but at some point, and very gradually I was able to show work, begin tutoring and, now I juggle this with my role as primary carer.

I am very protective of my work as still serving that personal purpose; I make my best work when I am free to explore and experiment, and I try to keep that at the heart of what I create.