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“There’s the great outdoors, but I love the great indoors,” says artist Lottie Cole. Depicted in colourful strokes of gouache, her old sofas, piles of books on desks and deep baths seem to say, “step in, welcome home”.
The paintings (which Cole describes as “not cool”) are more relaxed and lived in than the picture-perfect homes often found online. Instagram is awash with millions of beautiful, aspirational ideas to scroll. But the mood is shifting. Many want something slower, that’s more tangible, more real.
This winter, the theme of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters’ (ROI) annual exhibition at London’s Mall Galleries is “home”. The subject has a long history, from Vermeer’s moody Dutch scenes to the colourful interiors of Vanessa Bell. But here, among the more than 300 works, it’s the humble everyday tableaux that are most often celebrated. A small painting in the show, “Home” by Susan Bower (2025), depicts a pair of yellow washing-up gloves resting on a stainless steel sink; a half-empty Fairy liquid bottle sits behind them, along with a pottery bunny, mass-produced by mid-century manufacturer Sylvac.
Bower, who lives in the same farming village in Yorkshire where she grew up, “paints the things that I see”. Having raised four children, and now a grandmother of 10, “I just spend so much time at the sink,” she laughs. And the bunny? “When I was a child Mum used to collect Sylvac — so it reminds me of that.”
Cole’s rooms are imagined rather than taken from life. She is inspired by Monk’s House — Leonard and Virginia Leonard Woolf’s Sussex home. It’s a place that feels familiar: similar to her grandparents’ farmhouse, also in Sussex and a place that “people loved and thought was beautiful . . . They didn’t have lots of money but it was full of art,” she says. “Only when it was empty did we realise there was nothing intrinsically lovely about the property itself, except all their memories, all their stories about their things.” It’s this that she tries to capture — not the interior design.
In Cole’s imagined rooms there are paintings on the walls, often by under-recognised female modernists. “I like to put them back in the frame,” she says. Four of her paintings are included in an exhibition at Paul Smith’s Albemarle Street store this winter. One of them, “With My Back to the World”, features a sitting room decorated with an Agnes Martin striped canvas of the same name (1997), and a print of a horse and rider by Elisabeth Frink.
Her works are particularly popular with Americans, for whom they “trigger something in their memory, of rooms they knew”, she says. All the homes Cole depicts are places where she imagines people have lived a long time; there’s a clash of old and new that hits deep. “There’s immense privilege in being able to hold on to things for a long time,” she says. “Not everyone can.” She’s working towards a larger solo show next year inspired by Elizabeth Bowen, the modernist writer from the 1930s whose ancestral home in Ireland was demolished due to unaffordable upkeep costs. “Where do all those memories and objects go?” she asks.
Nostalgia plays into it. The arrival of my daughter had me nodding in agreement with writer Lauren Bravo’s Substack essay on the timeless style of the mums in Shirley Hughes’ children’s books from the 1980s. The focus is on the clothes, but Hughes’ illustrations of interiors are just as appealing. Socks are scattered across the floor at bath time, cupboards overspill with toys. Instead of invoking chaos or guilt or overwhelm, the overall mood is one of love. Bravo describes it as “beautifully messy” — a moment in time.
Many artists in the Mall galleries show take commissions for “room portraits”. “I could have sold that painting a hundred times over,” says Haidee-Jo Summers of “Kindly Light” (2023), a painting of a light-flooded kitchen. It’s ordinary — there’s a lino floor and the washing machine isn’t covered by a fancy linen skirt. “It’s simple,” she says, “a reminder of the stability of home.”
Home as a place for rest, a refuge from the world, is a comfort worth celebrating. Danielle McKinney’s paintings are about that “deep exhale” when we close the front door. She constructs interior scenes using images from Pinterest, social media and magazines to provide settings for her Black female protagonists. A recent painting, “Second Wind” (2025) shows a woman with freshly washed hair wrapped in a towel, sitting on a plush sofa. With her bright nail varnish and the glow of a cigarette tip, it’s a moment of pause, a recharge before she heads out again.
With a background in photography, McKinney starts with a black canvas — a nod to the darkroom — and draws her scenes into the light. The results are deep, enveloping spaces where the figures are confident and free. It is a reminder that home is a place of our own making. Away from the churn of interiors trends and over-curation, these are works that focus on how we feel in a space, who we invite in, and how our surroundings help us understand who we are.
ROI Annual Exhibition 2025, Mall Galleries, November 27-December 13; theroi.co.uk
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