Samuel Honey
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Jan 27
- 7 min read
Samuel Honey is a London-based painter working with figurative and surreal scenes. He uses oil and mixed media on canvas and wood panel, often building his paintings from dream memories, people he knows, and everyday objects. His work focuses on the body, intimacy, and emotional tension, with clear references to art history and to ordinary, lived spaces. He has exhibited in London and Coventry, and recent works such as “Nokia” and “Down, Along and Through” show his interest in narrative, distortion, and the psychological weight of familiar situations.
Q: What helps you decide when a dream image is worth turning into a painting?
A: The image must make me feel impelled to understand it. Painting, for me, is similar to the exercise of psychoanalysis. I read a lot of Freud and Lacan and have been in analysis this last year, which has been both insightful as well as serving as another iteration of my obsession with delving into narratives – primarily those of myself. The interpretation of dreams is a key aspect in both art and psychoanalysis. I find that in re-creating the dream image, something that strikes me as having roots that dig deep into the unconscious – that have a story to tell me about myself – is key. I find that the dream images I paint tend to appear to me at the climax of the dream, right before I wake. They are composed by something that is a part of me which I cannot fully call ‘myself’, and they are composed of a pictorial and symbolic language that was equally not created by me, but, like all language, pre-dates my birth and will exist beyond my death. The dream images that are worth capturing are the ones that indicate to me a story in medias res and that I have to interpret and uncover as I go.
Q: When you're working with a figure, what tells you it needs to stay clear or become more distorted?
A: I think of the body in a few different ways in my work. Firstly, it is a familiar and universal symbol — we can each relate in differing amounts to different figures insofar as we have bodies and understand ourselves, in part, as our bodies. However, and to a greater degree, I believe we understand the other through the symbol of the body — I cannot inhabit your internal world, and so I use your body symbolically as a stand-in for you as a whole. The body is a strong, if deeply flawed, metaphor for how each of us experiences ourselves and our lives: it brings together in unison, to those who perceive us as ‘whole’, what we experience as disconnected: our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, etc.
I cannot, in a literal sense, see myself as whole (how others see me) without external objects, such as mirrors, photographs, or paintings, and I think there is a tension in that requirement of externality or the gaze to project wholeness onto ourselves. In a sense, this tragedy of the barred (from becoming fully self-actualised) self is the tension of representation in my figures: we look at the other in their complete incompleteness — perhaps they are missing a head or limbs — and it brings about an uncanny feeling of the monstrosity to be found in the dysphoria of being neither fully object nor subject. Secondly, the body is an assemblage of a bunch of separate organs that come together to create the illusion/truth of wholeness. For me, some decisions around distortion are unconscious, while others feel semi-deliberate.
I will emphasise an organ (part) to disturb the day-to-day balance of the total – this may mean retaining something real from a reference picture while changing everything around it to change the context. Mostly, it’s the eyes for me which set the context in a figure, and so I like to play with these a lot, even if that means sometimes not painting them at all.
Q: You often use everyday objects as anchors in your scenes. What makes one of them feel important enough to paint?
A: I think of my objects like mise en scène in a play. They exist both on a real and symbolic level as context. I guess these everyday ‘anchoring’ objects are, in a sense, there to make you suspend your disbelief a bit; they are things that draw us in through recognition and suggest a use. But also, these things, put in another context, set off a different chain reaction of association. What is the use of a mirror that only shows you the past, or someone else entirely? Equally, a tap for being without fingers to manipulate it? In a way, I want to say that my mind lives in the world, and also is the creator, or curator, of its own world, just like everyone else’s. I daydream a lot, too, and in doing so I like to abstract things I see around me from the human functions that give them their meaning, to highlight the absurdity of everything we experience.
However, I don’t like going too far with that thinking because I also believe in the earnest nature of the human spirit and emotion. It’s chaotic, real, and even if that creates a feeling of the absurd, I, for one, still take part in the religion of it all by believing that there is still meaning to be found.
Q: Your paintings suggest a story but never spell it out. How do you choose how much to reveal?
A: I like the mystery aspect of forming the narratives yourself — kind of like those old create-your-own-adventure books, or fan theories about films and their associated head-canon. I want to share this experience with the audience. I think a painting can be minimalist or maximalist in a lot of ways — for example, I paint very tight and with a lot of detail and information condensed into a painting like “Down, Along and Through”, which is in some ways quite Bruegelian and maximalist, whereas “Nokia” is clearly more pared back in terms of scene and the roughness of the finished product.
However, I would say that I am always a minimalist when it comes to holding the hand of the audience.
Never put anything more into a painting than is absolutely required. Sometimes, what is required is a vast amount of symbolism to obscure the meaning, provide red herrings, and flesh out an obscure and disconnected story with a through line. For example, I created “Down, Along and Through” as a piece of cover art for an upcoming album of the same name for the band “Potato”, which I play in.
In it, there are four scenes that form a larger narrative, and each one corresponds to a single or focus track of the album.
This sort of scale necessitates a lot of work, so that each scene works as its own little story and progresses through time as the figures go on their journey. However, I use as many tricks to obscure the story as I can — animal symbols, masks, space as time, etc. I always ask myself at every step of the creative process, ‘does the piece need anything else?’ I will stop when the answer to that ceases to be a clear yes.
Q: In “Nokia,” what guided the mix of tenderness and tension in the scene?
A: Tenderness and tension, to me, are two sides of the same coin. There is tension in love, tension in sexuality, but also tension in impending doom, which in turn creates the tenderness and the fragility of life. All of these moments are more tender and more delicate, and, I guess, more special to me because of the context in which they are set.
The world we live in is a violent and dangerous place where people want to exploit you, abstract and commodify your humanity and inalienable access to your body, feelings, and relationships.
But beset on all sides by a rising tide of cyborgian lives that are lived more and more in the service of content production, people still feel those moments of real human love. That doesn’t mean to detract from the salience of these issues or even set out a calming blueprint for a better future, but it does, for me, symbolise a quiet and hopeful spirituality in the face of it all. The tender point of resistance in the face of human deletion is the art, in a way.
Q: When you're layering and reworking a painting, what part of that process usually surprises you most?
A: I think it can be surprising all the way through in different ways. I’m quite intuitive as a painter, and in my process, I like to experiment as I go, and sometimes things work and they stay, and other times they really don’t and I paint over them.
The layers that stay are those that I saw potential for contributing meaning in, another voice to add into the song. I am most surprised by mistakes in my work, I would say. I only perceive mistakes in works I already like or have a good feeling about. These are often ones that I’ve left for a time and have developed a more static meaning and interpretation in my mind. I then picture a potential development for the piece and pick the brush back up. I often find that the ‘mistakes’ I make are mistakes insofar as I have misrepresented a figure by discarding reference pictures or mishandled the paint — owing partly to my lack of any training, I imagine — and my immediate emotional reaction is disappointment: the surface is wet, muddy, overworked, the likeness is ruined. I then usually make a coffee and review from a couple of meters back, switching my focus between the whole and the mistake. After a while of this, and when I feel more emotionally regulated, something shifts and this mistake then becomes the very thing around which the painting begins to form. It becomes an unexpected point of divergence, as though another idea from another painter were wanting to take things in a different way, and I alter the path accordingly. I don’t know who it is who makes these lucky mistakes, but I thank them.
