Helena Traill
(British, Contemporary)
Helena Traill is a contemporary oil painter whose work sits at the meeting point of post‑impressionism, expressionism and lyrical abstraction. Working between urban and rural environments, she translates lived experience into colour‑driven, emotionally charged landscapes that are as much about memory and sensation as they are about the physical place. Her works are best described as ‘multi-impressionism’.
To Read Helena’s Biography and Review click here
Garden of England - An ORGANICS Collection
Helena Traill’s Garden of England series distils the essence of Devon, Dorset, the Cotswolds, Gloucestershire, Kent, Surrey, and Wiltshire into fields of colour, gesture, and atmosphere rather than recognisable detail.
Created as part of the ORGANICS collaboration, they stand as a collection we hope will continue with every county in England.
To view the Gardens of England click here.
Urban Collection
Traill’s Urban Collection opens with the completed New York Series which will expand to include London and Paris in 2026, culminating in a tri‑city exhibition in the Autumn. Sketched en plein air on the streets and then resolved in the studio, these works fuse multiple views into single images that feel like fleeting glimpses from a speeding taxi, painted in the moment yet charged with remembered emotion.
The resulting cityscapes depict composite places that exist only in the mind, yet they are instantly recognisable.
To view the New York works click here.
ORGANICS
ORGANICS brings together a new series of sculptures by Berelowitz and landscape paintings by Traill, each work centred on the significance of the organic world and its generosity to humanity. The featured plants are species that have sustained human life across millennia and will continue beyond us, both through their own evolution and through their translation into enduring artworks.
ORGANICS will be hosted digitally and culminate with two days in May 2026 at the historic Morris Singer Foundry in Alton, Hampshire, just outside London, where guests can witness molten metal being poured into moulds and follow the first painted layers through to the completion of the canvases.
To view the catalogue or attend the event click here
COMMISSIONS
Unusually Traill enjoys commissions and is often invited to immortalise a favourite view or much‑loved family home. Her distinctive practice, which weaves together lived experience and quiet reflection, makes the commissioned format feel completely natural to her way of working. Before observation, she prefers to sit down with the client to talk about what the place means to them, the memories held there and the mood they hope others will sense when the work is on the wall. This early conversation ensures that what she paints is not just a likeness of a view, but a considered response to its emotional and personal significance.
She then moves into the landscape alone, spending several hours drawing and noting the architecture and structure of the space in front of her. It is common for her to step away for a time and then return, so she can observe how the shifting light subtly alters what is seen. Back in the studio, the final work is developed from these studies, uniting what she observed in those specific moments with the client’s words, which now inflect how she thinks and feels about the place. The result is not a straightforward transcription of a view, but an interpretive painting that sits somewhere between present observation and remembered emotion.
The completed pieces are finely tuned, sensitive renderings of deeply personal spaces, expressed through an instinctive, emotion‑led palette.