Phoebe Unwin
Artists & Illustrators|July 2019

The curious painter of colourful semi-abstracts opens the doors to her bright North London workspace.

Steve Pill
Phoebe Unwin

For your last exhibition, Field, you said that “colour was the subject”. Is the same true for this new body of work?

The heart of all of my work is a meeting between the mark, the colour and the subject, and I’m always wanting to get those three things to be equally important. With this show, there’s more of a distinct presence of different subject matter. Each individual painting has got a different kind of response to the layers that have been built up into it.

When the works leave the studio for an exhibition, do you take a moment to sit down and consider what to do next?

Oh no, that has to naturally develop through what I’m making. When I go back into the studio after an exhibition, there’ll be loads of avenues I will go down that don’t necessarily work out. There’s a lot of experimentation and exploring – it might be the scale, it might be a subject, the combination of colours, the kinds of paint I’m using. I’ll be playing around with all those different elements.

You have five paintings on the wall now. Is it important for you to see them together and develop them in that way?

Definitely. I always work on groups of paintings.

Will it always be the same five?

Oh no, I keep shifting them around and then I build up the bigger group of paintings together.

What sort of things are you looking for together?

This story is from the July 2019 edition of Artists & Illustrators.

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This story is from the July 2019 edition of Artists & Illustrators.

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