Artist Statement

Freya Victoria Neighbour (b. 1997) is an emerging British painter based in the East of England.

She uses oil paint to draw through colour palettes of the landscapes she grew up in, from the sun-drenched terracotta of Naples to the muddy blues of the Fen marshland. Her close observations of native plant life of these places  inform her organic linework, and punctuate her palette with reds, whites, and yellows. Figurative forms are brought forth with both soft, hazy focus, and impulsive, spirited marks - a remnant of the muscle memory forged by hours spent transcribing her favourite paintings by JMW Turner and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as part of her academic studies. She paints to remember, either from life or nostalgic photographs - to document a relationship and make sense of memories otherwise forgotten, in vivid colour and sentimental detail.

Dealing with themes of memory, family, and domesticity, she documents how it feels to establish a settled rural life, to be still after a lifetime of moving. Her work is informed by her military childhood, spent abroad in Italy, Madrid, Germany, and Gibraltar, and across England in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, finally settling in her family's hometown in Cambridgeshire with her mother and sisters after her parents' separation. In her ongoing series of Dandelion paintings, she holds a preoccupation with the flower's image - perhaps as a symbol of being carried on the wind, wishes from within a 'provincial life', or the hope and whimsy of childhood.

She graduated with a first-class BA with Honours from Norwich University of the Arts in 2019, exhibiting a collection of pencil drawings and muted-toned paintings borne of her homesickness for The Fens. Her first painting to be exhibited was shown at The Guildhall in Cambridge in 2015, where she received a Commendation. She later exhibited as part of several group shows in Norwich, before moving to Essex, where she was employed as resident artist and co-ordinator of the arts programme at arts and culture venue, The Ironworks. In 2023, she returned home to her family in East Anglia, and now lives with her partner in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.