A Network of Remembered Skies

On a remarkably sunny April afternoon, Leila Bartell is busy painting in her West London studio. She is in the final stages of preparing for her solo show at Tristan Hoare, opening later this month, where her cloudscape paintings will explore memory, perception, and the environment. Her work creates a dialogue with romantic painters, like John Constable, based in reverence and reinterpretation. Bartell reflects on how perception and landscape have evolved in the face of contemporary concerns like climate anxiety and mediated experience. Though both painters share a fond fascination with clouds and their fluctuating movements, Bartell’s abstract portrayals of the sky are modern takes which leave room for the viewer to question our atmosphere. The clouds in her work mirror the sky in our own lives as an ever changing constant and evoke a feeling of innocence and nostalgia. In her studio, one is transported to a dreamlike state, searching the canvases for subconscious cues and intuitive interpretations. All the while, Bartell watches on, with huge curious eyes, encouraging the viewer to keep going. One gets the feeling she is also searching with you; like a parent relinquishing control and admiring the life her painting has taken on as its own.

Leila wears Bottega Veneta

Talulah: What was your childhood home like?

Leila: I tend to resist the word home, not because I lack roots, but because the idea has always felt more like a question than an answer. As a child, we lived between the Middle East and Europe. I spent my early years within a community that was deeply culturally diverse. That constant shift in language, texture, and light shaped how I perceive the world, fluidly, with overlapping realities. What some might call “home,” I understand more as a layering of impressions: scent, tone, atmosphere. I’m drawn to places that hold contradiction and complexity, and I think that comes through in my work. There’s no fixed origin point, only a network of remembered skies.

Talulah: How does your current home compare? How do you create a sense of home while you are travelling?

Leila: As a child, home is something you inherit, it's shaped by others, and you carve out a small corner that’s your own. As an adult, you begin to build spaces that reflect your own sensibilities. For me, home is about feeling expansive, calm, and attuned to light. I’m drawn to natural materials and open, outside spaces. Being

high up gives me an uninterrupted view of the sky, which brings a deep sense of freedom. That’s something I need in order to feel grounded: a kind of stillness that’s open rather than enclosed.

When I’m travelling, I don’t try to recreate home. Instead, I find it in the intangible, how light moves across a surface, the rhythm of a day, the quiet between moments. Those things allow me to feel anchored, no matter where I am.

Talulah: Where do you look for inspiration when you feel as if you've run out?

Leila: I make sure I’m always looking for things that inspire me, or that can fill my creative well, so that inspiration doesn’t run dry. I’ve always had a curiosity and thirst for knowledge, so I try to read as much as I can, especially non-fiction. It’s also important to stay engaged with the world around me, so I regularly attend gallery openings, explore the work of other artists, and make time to visit museums. We’re particularly fortunate here in London, with such rich access to art and culture. I also jot down thoughts and ideas, take pictures—whether it’s a screenshot of a poem, a frame from a film, or a photo of a fresco. Anything that I feel connected to, and that might eventually inform my work.

There’s an old Canon AE-1 camera that sits on a shelf in my studio. I rarely use it, but I keep it close. It’s not about function—it’s about presence. I’m drawn to objects that hold a sense of time, emotion, memory. There’s something about the way vintage things absorb atmosphere, as if they exist slightly out of phase with the present. They remind me to pay attention to texture, to stillness, to subtle shifts in light.

My inspirations are layered—poetry, memory, dreams, the emotional charge of colour. But painting, for me, is also a conversation with art history. I’ve always been moved by the old masters: the tension in Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, the lightness and intimacy in Goya’s Parasol, the sublime in Turner’s skies. Their influence isn’t always visible in my work—but it’s there, underneath, shaping the way I think about contrast, atmosphere, and emotional architecture.

I also find myself drawn to the sensuality of Fragonard, the restraint of Monet’s palette, and the cinematic staging in lesser-known artists like Pierre Narcisse Guérin. And I keep returning to Constable—not for his countryside, but for the skies. His weather feels psychological. The way he paints the atmosphere speaks to something internal: a kind of emotional weather system.

Inspiration isn’t a fixed point—it’s something that moves through you, constantly shifting. What guides me is a desire to create spaces that feel suspended—between clarity and ambiguity, intimacy and distance, reality and imagination

Talulah: Many of your paintings portray the sky. Do you have a favorite time of day to illustrate?

Leila: I’m drawn to the sky because it refuses containment, it’s mutable, contradictory, indifferent. I’ve become especially interested in transitional times: dusk, pre-dawn, the hours when the world feels uncertain or suspended between definitions. These fleeting moments reflect something I try to capture in my paintings, the sensation of not knowing whether something is beginning or ending. Constable once described the sky as 'the chief organ of sentiment in a landscape.' I tend to agree, though perhaps in my case, it's less about sentiment and more about perception: the way clouds can echo internal states.

Leila wears Bottega Veneta

Talulah: What role does color play in your art?

Leila: Colour, for me, is not decorative, it’s structural. It’s a carrier of emotional temperature, memory, and dissonance. I think of colour as a language of frequencies. Some are translucent and ephemeral, others are dense and visceral. In building up the layers of a painting, I’m often trying to create a feeling that light is moving through it, that time is refracted somehow. Colours interact the way thoughts or memories do: colliding, merging, dissolving.

Talulah: Are your paintings an extension of yourself? At what point do they take on their own being?

Leila: They begin in the body, but they don’t stay there. I see the painting process as a negotiation between the conscious and the unconscious. At a certain point, a painting begins to push back, it asserts its own logic, its own presence. When that happens, I try to listen rather than impose. The work is no longer about me, even if it passed through me. I’m interested in creating spaces that others can enter, not to find answers, but to encounter themselves, suspended in a different kind of time.

Interview: Talulah Brown

Artist: Leila Bartell

Photography: Charlotte Rea

Creative Direction & Production: Domino Leaha

Production: Elizabeth Bernet

Makeup Artist: Hadeel Tal

Hair Stylist: Marta Martineau

Leila Bartell wearing Bottega Veneta