In the Studio – Hester Berry

From her home studio in Devon, our headline artist Hester Berry approaches her work with deliberate restraint. Her landscapes feel pared back and immediate, distilled to their essential elements. At first glance, they can be read as abstract, but Berry is keen to resist that description. “If I was being really strict about it, I would say it’s not abstraction,” she explains, “it’s coming from the visuals, it’s mainly my simplification.” What might initially look like stylisation is her process of interpreting truth, “simplifying what is absolutely, definitely there in front of me.”

Every painting begins with the same reverence to observation. Berry starts with a visual anchor of reference, a photo captured on one of her walks in the rugged moorland and lush valleys of the South West Coast, the colours and “simplest of shapes” informing her process. The destination is loosely visible from the outset, but the route between the start and finish line is never entirely mapped out. “I do always have an idea and I know it’s probably going to look something like the reference in front of me,” she says, “but I don’t always know quite how I’m going to get there.”

Berry begins rapidly, blocking in the bones of the composition with fluid brushstrokes. “I’m getting the sense of the painting down quickly. I don’t do compositional sketches or rough studies. I just do it,” she says, and her medium encourages that freedom. As Berry observes, “oils are so flexible and movable, you can just shift things around,” making the painting itself the place where questions are resolved.

What appears effortless on the surface often involves intense concentration. Berry describes the challenge of translating the complexity of a landscape into a limited number of carefully placed marks. “It seems like a simple thing to do” she says “but it’s hard work to summarise so much.” As the surface fills, her tempo slows. The early energy settles into precise decision-making. “Every mark becomes very considered,” Berry explains, “my aim is never to use two marks where one will do.”

While the economy of markmaking and dedication to faithful representation is central to her process, pure observation does not dictate every decision on the canvas. Sometimes a painting implores her to add something extra, a gesture belonging to the painting rather than the landscape being captured. Berry describes adding “a few weird blobs, circles, lines, scratches” that feel necessary for the balance of the work. They’re not always present, and she can’t always summon them deliberately. “Sometimes if I’m teaching or doing a demonstration, people expect to see that and ask if I’m going to put them in,” she says, “but I can’t always just do it.” The process is instinctive. “Sometimes it needs to be choppier and scratchier and splashier, and sometimes it could need thinner paint and be more straightforward and simple.”

Instinct also plays a role in the most challenging decision of all: when to stop. Berry speaks about this with refreshing honesty. “I think I only ever know when it was finished in hindsight,” she laughs, “I think I overwork everything, it’s very, very rare that I catch myself and think, ‘Yep, that’s the perfect time to stop’.” To combat her instinct to keep going beyond what is needed, she has developed a strategy as a painting nears its conclusion. Berry intentionally slows down, taking longer and longer between each brushstroke so she can hopefully catch herself before she makes any extraneous marks. “Towards the end of a painting, I try to slow down so that it’s easier to stop myself in time, before I totally lose it and ruin it. I think what people see of my painting is always just slightly worse than what I saw just before I stopped. But as an artist, you still gain something from every painting, I learn from each one, and I stop slightly earlier every time.” 

In the studio she works with complete focus. Berry rarely has multiple canvases underway at once, preferring to be fully immersed in a single piece from beginning to end. “I’m only really working on one painting at a time because I like to be fully absorbed with it,” she says. “I don’t like a painting to go overnight. I don’t like the idea that I might be in a different mood, or not have the same enthusiasm to continue that painting.”

Even with a focus on discipline, she still hopes painting will surprise her. “The best paintings are ones that go in a different direction,” she reflects, adding that struggle can be as valuable as success. When things begin to unravel there is often unexpected freedom in it. “The worse a painting gets, the less you’ve got to lose” she says. For her, every painting becomes part of a larger process of learning and intuition. Ideas develop from looking at other artists’ work or from something she has read, quietly shaping the painting in unexpected ways and opening possibilities she can develop in future pieces. In that sense, even the moments that feel like failures become productive, and what begins as struggle often circles back into discovery. 

Hester’s headline show ‘Where The Light Falls’ is open 7 March 2026 – 3 May 2026.

Click here to see the full collection.