Harriet Owles (b. 1998) is a British painter working in “Geometric Figuration,” making realist figures in oil on stained linen and organising them within geometric structures that frame the body and shape the surrounding space. Her subjects are drawn from her immediate circle, friends, family, and self portraits, and the work is rooted in selfhood, how attention, memory, and relationship form identity.

 

Owles thinks through association, absorbing images, ideas, and visual material. Geometry becomes the way she organises that intake into something coherent and tangible. Each painting is built through discovery, testing what compels her through composition, structure, and surface until the image finds its internal logic. Film, art history, and personal archives, photographs and home videos, feed colour, pattern, and atmosphere.

 

Surface and paint handling are part of how the paintings communicate. Stained linen sets an encompassing ground, while paint handling shifts deliberately between passages, from worked, sculptural flesh to more planar, constructed clothing and geometric fields. Texture, sheen, and absorption are used deliberately to build presence and structure. She maintains a studio notebook, her “Painting Bible,” as a working archive where experiments are refined into repeatable methods that return across the work.

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She graduated from the Royal College of Art Painting Master in 2024.

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