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’.
Rooted in the impressionist tradition of working en plein air, Traill begins by observing directly in the landscape, but her finished paintings are then worked on in the studio and reconstructed from both the memory of the moment and the more reflective memory time has provided. This process places her work in a distinctly post‑impressionist lineage: like painters who broke from strict naturalism to pursue structure and feeling, she uses what was seen as a starting point for what is later felt.
Her work is described as resembling “a thousand snapshots collapsed into a single image”, Traill’s paintings function as multi‑temporal impressions – at once of the moment and of later reflection. The scenes feel as if glimpsed while passing quickly by, then reassembled through memory, intuition and time. This layering of temporal experience resonates with current conversations around memory, neurodiversity and multi‑sensory perception in contemporary painting.
Compositionally, her paintings oscillate between atmospheric passages and blocks of colour. Skies and horizons are rendered as broad, gestural impressions, while fields, buildings and paths are anchored byplanes that emphasise areas of emotional focus. This interplay of gesture and structure echoes both post‑impressionist construction of form and strands of abstraction, where subjective response is embedded in the architecture of the picture.
Colour is central to Traill’s practice. Rather than recording local colour, she works with a deliberately limited, non‑naturalistic palette of primary and secondary hues, chosen intuitively to reflect temperature, season and mood. Blues register cold, reds anticipate autumn; chroma becomes a language of emotion rather than description, aligning the work with expressionism and aspects of fauvism, where colour is liberated from observation and used symbolically.
Her works of the natural landscape always contain an indicator of the season, either on the cusp of the turn in a subtle foreshadowing in her palette or in full blown depth. You can feel in her work the smell of spring before it has arrived and the heat radiating up from the earth in August.
Her skies are filled with colours that reflect back into the landscape and the feeling of the artist herself reviewing the experience.
Texture is a defining element. Built up in layered oils, Traill’s surfaces are deliberately tactile, using impasto and physical mark‑making to guide the eye across the canvas. These raised, rhythmic passages create a multi‑sensory reading of the landscape, inviting viewers not only to see but almost to feel the space. In this way, the work speaks to contemporary interests in materiality and embodied perception.
Spending time with Traill reveals a mind at play within structure. Her duality – a simultaneous need for order and resistance to the boredom of one input – crystallises a generational tension: the desire for rigor in an era defined by digital distraction, rapid input, and fragmented attention. Her paintings are the distilled answer to this conflict. She has channelled her generation’s multi‑impression, multi‑sensory experience into coherent images that operate within a strict framework of traditional practice. Her works cross generations because of this but also restores our faith in the survival of art in this digital age.
As a neuro‑divergent artist, Helena Traill brings a finely tuned awareness of overlapping sensory inputs to her work. This heightened way of processing the world underpins what might be called a form of “multi‑impressionism” - images built from repeated impressions, emotional after‑images and displaced colour relationships. The result is a body of work that extends the project of impressionism into the present – not merely capturing light at a single instant, but registering the complex, cumulative experience of being in a place over time.
URBAN SERIES
Traill has been working on three series of original paintings from three of our most vibrant cities - London, Paris and New York. All of which she visited in 2025, sketching on the streets and parks of these cities to create a view that is at once familiar but also deeply personal. In the studio the works have become one image from a combination of views along a main thoroughfare, like glimpses from a speeding taxi window - an artist’s compilation view of the city made in the present and in reflection from the future. The works are therefore of views we can never visit but which we instantly recognise.
The three series will combine into one exhibition in Autumn 2026 and each series will be released separately over the course of the next year ahead of the exhibition.
NEW YORK
The series spans an intimate to substantial scale, with works ranging from 17 cm in width through to a largest piece at 81 cm, allowing the city to be experienced from jewel-like vignettes to expansive skyline studies. The palette moves from bright, celebratory colour to brooding dusk tones.
Palette and mood - Across the group, Traill’s handling of light is central, with high-key chroma used to articulate the reflective, glassy surfaces of New York by day, and richer, more saturated passages marking the onset of night. This range creates a cohesive narrative of the city’s rhythms, inviting viewers to move between joyous, sunlit façades and more contemplative pauses.
‘Memory in Monochrome’ - At the Agency’s request, Traill has created a new pen and charcoal skyline study, ‘Memory in Monochrome’, which offers a distilled reading of New York without the distraction of colour. This work consciously echoes an earlier monochrome London work from Traill’s studio, a drawing that has long been a touchstone for us and which prompted an ongoing desire to revisit her cityscapes in black and white.
Access and preview - In keeping with the curatorial integrity of the Urban Series, no works from the New York group will appear on public digital platforms until the exhibition opens in Autumn 2026. For collectors and curators who wish to view or purchase ahead of her exhibition a private digital preview can be arranged on request below.
Detail of ‘Reflections of the City’
Oil on Stretched Canvas
Framed: 65 x 81 cm
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.
VIEWING WORKS WITH HARVEY HORSWELL
STUDIO – Helena’s studio has now relocated from London to Bristol, just an hour and a half from London by train, where she regularly welcomes clients and hosts open studio events.
LONDON – Harvey Horswell maintains membership access to the House Clubs at both the Royal Academy on Piccadilly and the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. To organise a presentation of a curated selection of works in these spaces, simply contact us via the button below.
EXHIBITION – Helena’s next solo exhibition will take place in London in Autumn 2026 and will present her first complete Urban Series, spanning London, Paris and New York. This body of work continues her exploration of cityscapes as immersive fields of colour and emotion.
COLLABORATION – Traill will be collaborating with another artist on a multi-sensory event series launching in April, hosted in one of the UK’s leading casting foundries just outside London. To follow the development of this project and receive early details, please follow Harvey_Horswell on Instagram or TikTok.
COLLECTIONS – Traill’s work has recently been accepted into two significant collections, which will be formally announced in the New Year. These placements mark an important step in the ongoing institutional and private recognition of her works.
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