Hannah Thomas
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Hannah Thomas is a British painter based in Wiltshire. She studied photography at UWE in Bristol and spent over a decade in London working as a professional photographer, mostly in the music industry. In 2019 she switched to painting because she wanted more autonomy and creative freedom. She now works in the studio full time.
She paints with acrylics, oil sticks, Indian ink, charcoal and pastel, applied with fingers, brushes, sponges and cloths. She does no preparatory sketches. Everything starts from scratch on the canvas in what she describes as an instinctive conversation with the paint. She applies and erases, applies and erases. She moves fast between the canvas and the paint table and half the time does not know what color is on the brush until it hits the surface.
Her current series is called Tooth and Claw. The paintings are semi-abstract landscapes that pulse with hints of predation. Nature appears as a site where beauty and violence sit next to each other. She says there is something personal in it too, a need to become more accepting of decay and death, and that working through it in the unsentimental context of nature makes it easier to grasp.
She had her first solo show in London in 2023 and was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize. She completed the Turps Correspondence Course and starts an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in September 2026.
