Sydney artist Ash Holmes’ bold, gestural paintings are guided by intuition and emotion

Art runs in Ash Holmes’s blood. Both her mother and grandmother were artists so, growing up, she was constantly surrounded by creativity. “I was around [my mother’s] studio at home … She would often set up a little station for me to paint next to her,” the Sydney-based artist recalls.

As she grew older, Holmes developed her own style and honed her craft by painting and designing at odd jobs she worked, from cafes to fashion brands. At the age of 23, the young, self-taught creative went full-time with art. Almost a decade later, she’s still going strong. “It’s been a continuous flow-on effect of me moving studios into bigger spaces, painting larger-scale works and doing shows,” she says.

Holmes’ works, created with oil and acrylic paint, have a distinctively soft, muted palette. The artist is inspired by the scenic landscapes of Sydney’s northern beaches (where she lives) as well as prominent names in abstract art including British artist Tracey Emin and American painter Cy Twombly. “I love the mystery in abstract work,” Holmes says. “I love that it’s open to interpretation. I love that it has fluidity. You don’t really know exactly what you’re viewing but you get a feeling from the piece.”

Having studied colour psychology helps Holmes evoke those emotions in her works. “I use [the practice] as a tool to understand why certain colours have a sensory effect on us,” she explains. “The combination of knowing how colours make us feel and why certain colour combinations work together, and why some colour combinations might not … is the language that my work has.”

The process of bringing her gestural artworks to life is guided by intuition and following impulses. Holmes doesn’t sketch out the pieces before she starts, she simply puts paint to canvas and follows her gut as to what should happen next. It can be a risky practice, she says, but that’s part of the joy of it all.

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“How my piece starts is not necessarily the direction that it might finish,” Holmes says. “My favourite moment is when I’m really liking a piece and I think it’s working but, in order for me to push it to a new level of having mystery within it, I [need] to paint over it and then discover what I can pull back from those layers … I layer back and forth until the works have a sense of balance.”

Holmes’s large-scale paintings have been exhibited in shows and held in private collections around the world including the US, Dubai, France and Japan. Currently you’ll find her work at Hake House of Art, the Sydney gallery she co-founded with two other collaborators, as well as Copenhagen’s Galleri Christoffer Egelund and Circle Contemporary in the UK.

As for specific commissions that live in clients’ homes, the brief is led by Holmes asking people to select two or three of her works that they love and explain why. “I put all of that into a mixing pot in my brain,” she says. “I birth their piece by considering those notes that they’ve made.”