Olivia Ross
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Sep 26
- 5 min read
Olivia Ross is a painter based in East Lothian, Scotland. Her work focuses on memory, loss, and the way childhood scenes stay with us. After a house fire in 2017 destroyed almost all of her family photos, she began painting from the few that survived. The series revisits birthdays, holidays, and quiet moments at home, using layers of oil paint to reflect how memories shift in detail and tone. Light, shadow, and looseness play a key role in how each image takes shape. Her background in film and medieval history shapes how she thinks about time, storytelling, and visual atmosphere. While the series is deeply personal, it leaves space for viewers to connect their own memories to the scenes.
Q: After the 2017 fire you lost almost all family photos and videos. How did painting become a way to hold on to those memories?
A: The fire happened in 2017, but I am still constantly reminded about the various irreplaceable things that were lost, and painting became my way of connecting to those lost objects and the memories associated with them. When you lose things in a house fire, you don’t have a list of what was missing. I don’t have an inventory of the photos in those albums, which family members were featured and what special moments they had captured. This realization was especially galling when I was thinking about the moments that were captured in the home videos. When I started painting, I was thinking about those lost moments and what life they gave to family members who are no longer with us. Painting scenes associated with my childhood from the photos that remained offered a platform for what was missing and helped me reconstruct both memory and meaning in the aftermath of this loss. It will never make up for the loss as a whole but it has helped me to process the feelings I had about the fire.
Q: Birthdays, holidays, and small family scenes return in your paintings. What makes those moments stay with you?
A: As well as being about my personal losses in the house fire, the project is also about the fleeting nature of early childhood memory. I know there are many who don’t remember their childhoods very clearly and I get struck by the idea of the malleability of memory, especially in those formative years of childhood. In this project, I was trying to capture moments that an individual would remember as a single scene, for example a birthday, Christmas, or playing in a well-remembered living room. These moments linger in my mind not because they were grand or extraordinary, but because they carry the warmth of connection and the essence of childhood. Drawing from familiar scenes that most people would typically experience in childhood, the paintings can also act as visual prompts, encouraging the viewer to overlay their own experiences and memories onto the scene.
Q: Memory in your work shifts between sharp detail and blur. How do you decide how much to reveal in a scene?
A: I didn’t actually start out with a fixed plan for varying the looseness in each piece. Instead, with every painting, the right balance between clarity and obscurity revealed itself intuitively. Because of my background studying film, I am always drawn to cinema as inspiration, and for this project "Blade Runner 2049" was especially influential due to its themes of memory creation and manipulation. In the film, the character of Dr Ana Stelline says that realism and memory don’t go together: "we recall with our feelings… and our feelings are awful students. The mind is an impressionist. Anything real should be a mess." Memories are not precise recordings of the past and we don’t decide which memories are in sharp focus and which are hazy. That insight prompted me to vary the looseness across the paintings, mirroring how memories shift in clarity.
Q: Your process builds in layers, from underpainting to glaze. What does that layering give the work?
A: I used a glaze not only to unify the paintings as a collective, but also to inject some more warmth wherever I felt it was lacking. I began each painting by establishing the primary layer, which defined the forms and structures within the composition. Subsequent layers were applied to refine and enhance the interplay of light and shadow, adding depth and dimension to the work. The final step involved glazing, a technique where a thin, diluted layer of paint is applied over the dried surface. This not only unified the colour palette but also imparted a cohesive warmth and luminosity to the finished pieces. I felt that this addition imparted a visual cohesion to the project.
Q: You move between landscapes, skies, still lifes, and portraits. How do you choose where to focus next?
A: I follow what genuinely interests me in the moment, whether that is something sparked by a photograph I have taken, a compelling exhibition I’ve seen, or a random image that gets stuck in my mind. I have a huge number of photographs on my phone that I have taken over the years. I take pictures of anything I find visually interesting and when I need inspiration for a collection or an individual painting, I look through my camera roll and take it from there. Sometimes that is a starting off point and sometimes I paint directly from one of my photos.
I feel that sometimes as artists we are pressured to pick one niche and stick to it, but that isn’t in my nature, and I would also find painting the same thing in the same style all the time to be extremely boring. I have a lot of interests and therefore would hate to be pigeonholed. I think the ability to move across genres, mediums, and subjects allows me to sustain inspiration, and respond intuitively to new ideas and opportunities.
Q: Light and shadow run through much of your painting. What keeps you coming back to that play?
A: I love using contrast in my work in many ways, whether it be light/shadow, warm/cool or sharp detail/loose brush strokes. I find this gives depth to a painting as well as keeping visual interest in the viewer. I also love when a painting has all of these aspects, and a viewer could look at it a hundred times or for hours on end and find new things to focus on each time. When it comes to light and shadow I have always been inspired by the old masters, specifically Caravaggio, whose use of light and shadow was not only groundbreaking at the time of painting but also for me when I first saw his work. I studied Medieval History (and Film) for my first undergraduate degree, which sparked my fascination with that era of art history. The work of painters like Caravaggio can offer genuine insight into society at the time, with paintings that were visually appealing to the people of that time still resonating in the modern day.
