Selected as Artit’s 2024 Jury Selection Landscape Artist of the Year, Amy-Rose Holland transforms memory, atmosphere, and long-form observation into what she calls non linear landscapes—portraits of place shaped by experience rather than fidelity. Drawing from extensive field recordings, collected sketches, overheard conversations, and emotional resonance, each work distills the strange familiarity of lived environments into layered, intimate topographies. In this interview, the artist reflects on stillness, distortion, and the deep archive of everyday space.

✧✧✧

Your landscapes often evoke a dreamlike stillness—what draws you to this atmospheric quiet, and how do you go about capturing it on canvas?  

I create what I call non linear landscapes, by taking my sketchbook out and making extensive recordings of a place, sketches, photos and oral recordings, recording different lights, detailed sections and consuming what resonates. Sometimes these archives will form over months, even years, other times I’ll just have one day and it will all come together. Back in the studio, I turn these elements into non linear landscapes, where they are reimagined into an abstracted portrait of a place, rather than a servile reproduction. I believe the results lead to a truer representation my experience of an environment.

What role does memory or emotion play in shaping the places you paint? Are they often rooted in real locations, imagined spaces, or a blend of both? 

Can you walk us through the creative process behind one of your most recent landscape pieces—from initial inspiration to final brushstroke?

If you haven’t visited the dinosaurs in Crystal Palace, take a trip. A favourite day out for Queen Victoria, the sculptures were made by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and were the first attempt to full scale models of fossils that had just been found. Dinosaur fossils were first discovered in 1820, and these were started in 1850, so were really a first imagining of what they may have looked like (any paleontologist will tell you they’re wildly inaccurate and that just makes me love them even more). There’s a really great episode of The Feast podcast where they talk about how they ran out of money half way through producing them, and so to raise cash held a New Year’s Eve dinner in the belly of the half made Iguanadon. SInce then they have been an under the radar national treasure, go go go! I had wanted to make this piece for a long time, and it was by chance one day that it all came together. I had sketches from years and years of visiting, in different seasons, with different people, in different headspaces, and it was finding the perfect silver frame left for free on the street near my house in New Cross, that was the final piece of the puzzle.

 

The creatures in the painting are made from sketches on a winter visit, and the background is from hot spring days, where everything suddenly bursts into life. I think the difference of seasons here creates even more of an otherness for the dinosaurs in the lake, like they ought not be there, which I hope captures a little of the bewilderment you experience when you first see them. I like to photocopy my sketches and place them around the scene, finally ending up with a collage composite that works for the composition. I like to use a wide variety of media in my work, and Dinos is a good example of this. I’ve used graphite, house paint, ink, chalks, I think there’s even some radiator enamel in there that was lying around the flat. I usually like to start from the inside out, so that the piece can organically flow within its parameters. 

 

My top tip for my students is start with the most boring part OR the part that interests you most (a process I call ‘eat your pudding first’). I always work this way, often picking my pudding, but in this piece I was most intimidated by the ripples in the water, and so started here, and let the creatures emerge afterwards. 

Light seems to play a central role in your work. How do you think about light—not just as a technical element, but as a narrative or emotional tool?

I’m not sure that in my non linear landscapes light plays much of a central role, as they are made up from so many different times of year and day, that the lightsource is often just as obscured as the perspective. I do pay a lot of attention to light in my recent Weird and Wonderful London series, as London light does such strange things: it will go from yellow to lilac in an instant. I love working quickly on these, and trying to get the way it hits just right before it changes for the rest of the day.

Landscape art has a long tradition. How do you see your work in dialogue with that history, and what do you hope it brings that feels new or personal?  

Landscape painting has such a layered history—from romanticism to realism, the sublime to the pastoral—and I think part of what draws me to it is that sense of continuity. Landscapes change over time in dialogue with the people that recrod/use/abuse/love them. I’m less interested in capturing a grand or idealised view and more in exploring how place intersects with community and memory. My favourite artists are Paula Rego, Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash, all artists that bring themselves into their landscapes. David Hockney: A Bigger Picture at the RA in 2012 was a big milestone moment for me, and I think it was getting lost in those Yorkshire Dale iPad drawings that really started my love affair with landscapes. Before that I worked predominantly in monochrome and was almost afraid of colour - they changed everything! 

What I hope to bring to it is a sense of subjectivity—a landscape that’s felt rather than purely observed. My pieces often sit somewhere between the external world and the internal one, with emotional topographies playing as central a role as the architecture or geography. They’re shaped by fragments, and a distortion that I think reflects how we carry landscapes within us—how places can linger long after we’ve left them. In that way, I think my non linear landscapes are deeply personal, but also connected to collective experience.

What have been some of your biggest challenges—or revelations—when working in this genre?

Do you approach the natural world differently when painting it—perhaps noticing details or emotions you wouldn’t otherwise in everyday life? 

A grey sky can feel peaceful one day, heavy the next. I think making landscapes makes me more aware of that shifting relationship—how nature becomes a mirror or  container for what we’re feeling. So it's not just about observing the landscape, but noticing how I’m responding to it: what I’m drawn to, what I ignore, what lingers. In that sense, the process feels less about capturing a scene and more about translating an experience—how it felt to stand in that place, not just what was there. 

In the same way that detectives have big ledgers and hundreds of little notebooks documenting every little thing, I do the same in my sketchbooks. I love that bit at the end of Catch Me if You Can where Tom Hanks asks the other detective where Leonardo DiCaprio grew up in France and he just flicks through his little notepad and finds it, Montrichard. This is the kind of tiny thing I scour my sketchbooks for to remember that one little detail that will bring everything together.

How do you balance spontaneity with structure in your landscapes? Do you plan your compositions or allow them to unfold more intuitively?  

It’s definitely a balance, but one that leans toward intuition. The collaged compositions are more of a starting point than a map. Spontaneity is essential to my process and practice in general. I like to work in layers and on multiple projects at a time—adding, obscuring, scraping back—and that rhythm naturally invites accidents, shifts, and surprises. That said, structure does emerge, just usually later on. Once the painting starts to settle, I’ll begin making more deliberate choices: adjusting balance, strengthening composition, bringing certain areas into focus. But even then, I try to stay responsive. I want the work to feel like it’s breathing, not pinned down. 

What’s the most challenging aspect of painting landscapes for you—and what has kept you committed to this genre over time?

One of the most challenging aspects of painting landscapes is finding new connections, I’m much less interested in it being just beautiful or recognisable. I want the work to hold things: to feel lived in, not just looked at. 

We’re all just moving around our tiny corners of the world, and I think so often we take our scenery for granted. People make up a place, and I always like to think about who lived in a flat before me, drank at the pub, ran the same route round the park.  

As Artit’s Landscape Artist of the Year, what do you hope people take away from your work? What kind of emotional or visual experience do you want to offer viewers? 

I hope people come away from my work with a sense of quiet recognition, like they’ve glimpsed a place they’ve been to before, even if they can’t quite name it. I’m less interested in presenting a specific view, and more in offering something felt rather than fully seen. Visually, I try to balance detail with openness, so there’s room for the viewer to enter the work and bring their own associations. Emotionally, I hope the work gives people space to pause, reflect, maybe even feel a bit unsettled in a gentle way. I’m drawn to landscapes that hold tension—between presence and absence, beauty/decay, stillness and movement. The best review I ever had of one of my pieces was: “I like it. What is it?” 

✦ ✦ ✦

Holland’s landscapes offer more than visual representation—they hold mood, residue, and traces of community. Each composition folds memory into terrain, allowing distortion and personal narrative to shape the structure of space. Through abstraction, atmosphere, and collected detail, these works extend an invitation: to look slower, remember sharper, and find recognition in places both real and reimagined.