Sophie O’Leary is a London-based painter working with colour and the felt encounters with place. Her paintings move between observation and abstraction, growing from walking, memory and sustained attention to particular sites, from fields and flowers to gardens, river edges and urban nature.

Her current body of work begins with Thames-side gardens and sanctuaries between Westminster, Millbank and Battersea. These are tended spaces of care and containment held within the city, where natural growth, architecture, social history and personal experience meet.

For Sophie, these gardens offer a way of thinking about painting. Both are made through acts of cultivation: preparing a ground, building colour, tending atmosphere, responding to what appears and allowing forms to develop over time. The painting evolves to become its own kind of sanctuary – not separate from the world, but a held space in which feeling, memory and colour can gather.

She is interested in the genius loci, the ‘spirit of place', and in how painting can register layered time: historical trace, geographical memory, seasonal cycles and lived experience. Her landscapes are not fixed views but emotional encounters with light, weather, bloom and material.

Materials are central to this process. Working with oil, watercolour, distemper, drawing and gathered substances such as Thames water, sand, charcoal, plant-based inks and mineral colour, Sophie allows the physical matter of place to enter the work. The resulting paintings are richly hued and sensorial landscapes, alive with a sense of growth, weathering, resilience and renewal.