The Last Peasant-Painters Peeling Potatoes (Old Woman Mill)

Sigrid Holmwood strives to get to the heart of painting: not just as an activity, but as a material substance of entrenched history, inherited knowledge and innate meaning. She trawls internet forums and centuries-old archives, and consults conservationists, chemists and herbalists to revive the lost recipes of paint-making. Her pigments and glazes are concocted entirely from scratch, using ingredients ranging from precious stones to powdered insects. Half Swedish, Holmwood is inspired by the 19th-century peasant painters of the Dalarna province, whose folk art is a national symbol of Sweden. Based on an archive photo of the actual last peasant painter, the figures in The Last Peasant Painters Peeling Potatoes (Old Woman Mill) are sat in front of a typical Dalecarlian composition. The image seen on the wall is based on a folk legend of old women who are ground up in a mill and emerge rejuvenated. ‘I painted the woodwork using a technique which these artists used to represent mahogany’, Holmwood reveals. ‘It’s paint glazed with a sour milk and pigment mixture and sealed with oil. It gives a psychedelic effect’. The bold, luminescent image also has a distinctly post-Impressionist edge. ‘I am interested in 19th century themes,’ Holmwood says. ‘That’s the period when they started to feel rural culture was being lost, and artists made a real political gesture against the city. Van Gogh went to Provence to live with peasants, and likened the act of painting to the peasants ploughing their fields. I like the idea that there is a history of artists doing that, artists trying to rough it. The psychedelic colours refer to the hippie movement, going back to the land, living in communes, which is a similar sentiment. I think these “hippie ideas” are having a resurgence today with people growing their own vegetables in allotments and the “slow food movement” ... I think of my work as being a “slow painting movement”’.