Psychological Temperature
In dialogue with Poppy De Havilland
FVTVRIST Magazine // Interview by Anna S.
21 May 2026
The figures that move through Poppy De Havilland's paintings are suspended between the familiar and the strange. The same young woman appears again and again, not quite a character, not quite the artist, not quite a symbol, rarely meeting the viewer's gaze, holding something inwardly that stays just out of reach. Gravity feels uncertain. Bodies balance in improbable ways. Objects hover. Nothing is quite grounded.
Sylvia Plath arrives in the titles after the paintings are finished. So does Hammershøi. So do Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico — painters De Havilland came to partly through her studio proximity to Von Wolfe, who introduced her to early Italian painting and to the open-source side of AI image-making. The references don't explain the images. They shift them slightly, add what she calls a psychological temperature.
De Havilland works with AI, but not in the way that conversation usually goes. She trains models on her own archive, paintings, travel photographs, old masters, sculpture and takes what comes back to oil on canvas. The model distorts, misreads, doubles figures unexpectedly. She keeps the accidents that interest her. When it returned a figure bent double with another on her back, she removed the second figure and replaced it with a swan. The result was Twinborn. The accident was the point.
Fvtvrist met Poppy De Havilland ahead of her exhibition in Los Angeles, visible until the June 13.
Iron Bone, 2025
Oil on canvas
Canvas dimensions: 150 x 150 cm
Framed dimensions: 152.6 x 152.6 cm
Copyright The Artist
Poppy de Havilland, portrait © Courtesy of the artist.
Sylvia Plath is named twice in these works: Lady Lazarus, Colossus Reimagined. The exhibition carries her even under its title. Plath wrote the body as both theatre and ruin, performance and relic. What drew you toward her writing, and what can a poem become once translated into paint?
The reference to Plath came after the paintings were made, rather than before. I wasn’t consciously working from her writing in the studio, although I have studied her in the past, and I think it’s likely her work remained somewhere in the background of my thinking. When the paintings were finished, I began to recognise an atmosphere in them that felt close to aspects of her work: transformation, performance, doubleness, resurrection, a sense that the self is never stable, and the body as something both vulnerable and monumental.
With Lady Lazarus and Colossus Reimagined, I wasn’t trying to illustrate the poems. The titles came later, almost as a way of naming a psychological charge that was already present in the paintings; Plath’s language offered a point of recognition rather than a starting point.
I’ve become interested in what happens when a literary reference enters a painting after the fact. It doesn’t necessarily explain the image, but it can deepen or destabilise it, adding a psychological temperature. A poem can suggest an emotional architecture, but once it enters a painting, it loses the sequence of language and becomes a single suspended moment.
In that sense, Plath was not the subject of the work, but a way of further understanding something I had already made.
1/ Lady Lazarus, 2025
OIl on canvas
2/ Interval, 2026
Oil on canvas
© Courtesy of the artist.
Cold Fire. Iron Bone. Unseen Gaze. Twinborn. Your titles often feel internally divided, as though each image is holding two psychological conditions at once. What does a painting gain from contradiction, and why does paradox interest you as an emotional structure?
I think painting is particularly suited to paradox because it doesn’t have to unfold in a linear way; multiple conditions can be present at once. The figure can look exposed and unreachable; an object can feel ordinary and symbolic; a scene can seem quiet but psychologically charged. I find this doubleness gives the work its emotional structure, allowing the painting to resist closure.
Ultimately, I’m interested in how these contradictions keep the image unstable and prevent it from becoming too legible.
Twinborn, 2026
Oil on canvas
Canvas dimensions: 150 x 130 cm
Framed dimensions: 152.6 x 132.6 cm
Copyright The Artist
Exhibition View, Richard Heller Gallery
© Courtesy of Richard Heller Gallery
The same young woman moves repeatedly through your paintings. Her expression often hovers between intimacy and distance, vulnerability and opacity. She rarely fully reveals herself to the viewer. What kind of emotional condition interests you most in this figure, and what must remain unknowable about her?
I often think about the lost or inward gaze found in Italian Renaissance painting - the sense of a figure looking beyond the viewer, or through them, as though absorbed in another psychological register. In my paintings, some figures look directly outward, such as in Twinborn, with an awareness that they are being observed, and that awareness creates a distance of its own. Other figures turn away entirely, as in the paintings seen from behind, such as Lady Lazarus and Unseen Gaze, where I was also thinking about Hammershøi and the quiet psychological force of a turned back.
There is a charged stillness that runs through many of the paintings. It is an atmosphere I return to often: a sense that the figure is holding something inwardly, but that we can’t quite know what it is. That ambiguity is important to me because it protects the figure from becoming too available to the viewer.
Many of your images feel suspended between dream-state and ritual. There is a sense that the objects, animals, and gestures obey an internal symbolic logic. How consciously do you construct mythology inside the work, and how much emerges intuitively during the painting process?
When creating the paintings, I try to build an atmosphere that feels slightly otherworldly, or difficult to place in time. I’m interested in images that sit between the familiar and the strange, where bodies and objects obey an internal logic rather than the ordinary laws of physics. Gravity often feels uncertain in the paintings: figures balance in improbable ways, as in Iron Bone, objects appear suspended, and the compositions sometimes resist a stable sense of weight or ground.
I don’t deliberately place mythology into the paintings. If mythological associations arise, they tend to come later, either through my own reflection or through the viewer’s interpretation. For example, Twinborn began much more as a psychological piece. I was thinking about power dynamics, shared psychology, and the possibility of the animal and the figure becoming one structure within the composition. It was only after the painting was complete, when I was searching for a title, that I began to think about Leda and the swan and Castor and Pollux. Since then, many viewers have brought those references to the work themselves.
I'M INTERESTED IN IMAGES THAT SIT BETWEEN THE FAMILIAR AND THE STRANGE, WHERE BODIES AND OBJECTS OBEY AN INTERNAL LOGIC RATHER THAN THE ORDINARY LAWS OF PHYSICS.
Before the brush comes the diffusion model. You feed it fragments from your archive: travel photographs, Renaissance painting, sculpture, previous works, textures, memories. The machine returns something suspended between recollection and invention. What is the algorithm to you ultimately: a collaborator, a subconscious, a translator, a stranger working in your handwriting?
I think of the algorithm as a collaborator, although not in a straightforward or traditional sense. I trained my first model around four years ago, and since then I’ve trained many more, each time feeding in the strongest and often most recent of my artworks. Over time, the models have developed alongside the work itself. They are shaped by what I have already made, but they also return possibilities that push the paintings somewhere else. In that sense, the process can feel almost reciprocal, as though we are feeding off one another.
I often begin with a concept I know I want to paint, but the model will return something slightly different, and very often that difference is what becomes interesting. It might misunderstand the image, distort a body, merge two forms, or suggest a compositional relationship I hadn’t anticipated. Sometimes I prefer what it gives back to my original idea. At other times, the opposite happens: the generated image clarifies what I don’t want, and I return more firmly to my own intention.
Twinborn is a good example of this. The initial idea was for the figure to be bent over, but the software returned an image with another figure on her back. That unexpected doubling opened up the idea of a power dynamic and a shared psychology. I removed the second figure and replaced that human weight with the dense presence of a swan, but the original accident was important. It shifted the emotional structure of the final painting.
So in the way I use it, the algorithm is not simply a tool for producing images, it is a space of exchange, where my previous work, my current intentions and the machine’s distortions meet.
Artist’s studio
© Courtesy of Poppy de Havilland
Your work is particularly interesting because AI never becomes the final image. The painting still insists on slowness, tactility, and human uncertainty. What does oil painting allow you to recover from the digital image?
The digital stage is a very important part of the work, and I don’t see it as something quick or disposable. Sometimes developing a final AI image can take almost as long as making the painting itself - in this sense, the digital process already has its own form of labour and uncertainty.
What oil painting offers is not a correction of the digital artwork, but a transformation into another type of presence. The image is no longer something seen on a screen; it becomes an object with weight, scale, tactility and a long lineage of image-making, which gives the medium a particular charge. Oil painting allows the image to slow down and become more present.
Colossus Reimagined, 2024
Oil on canvas
Canvas dimensions: 50 x 50 cm
Framed dimensions: 52.6 x 52.6 cm
Copyright The Artist
You share a studio environment with Von Wolfe. His practice also moves between art history, technological mediation, and painting. What has proximity to his thinking opened within your own work, and where have you had to consciously separate your visual language from his?
Von Wolfe has had a key influence on the way I think about painting. He initially introduced me to some of the painters who have become very important to me, such as Piero della Francesca, Uccello and Fra Angelico, and he helped open up a way of looking at early painting that informs how I think about composition, stillness, structure and atmosphere.
One of the most important ways this proximity has shaped my own work is through technology. Von Wolfe was the first contemporary artist I knew to begin seriously using AI within his painting practice, which in turn made me curious about the process. Together, we began learning the more complex, open-source side of AI image-making. This was an important learning curve, as it offered much greater control over style, training and process than more generic commercial applications, allowing the technology to become something more specific to our own visual worlds.
At the same time, I don’t feel that I have had to consciously separate my visual language from his. The separation has happened naturally, through our individual preferences, temperaments and ways of working. Looking at both of our artworks, it probably makes sense that we share a studio; there are crossovers in our interests and in the wider visual world we are both engaged with. But the relationship between the two practices is not static. At times they may feel close to one another, and at other times they diverge more clearly. That movement feels natural to me, and comes from the fact that the emotional atmosphere of the work on both sides is different.
Your titles often function like fragments of poetry: Where the Sky Begins, Interval, Tilt. They do not explain the image but destabilise it slightly. Does the title arrive before the painting, during it, or after it has already found its psychological atmosphere?
So far, the title has come after the painting. When deciding upon the title, I'm drawn to something that feels like a fragment of poetry, something that can shift the image slightly, or open another register within it. A title such as Interval or Tilt doesn’t describe the painting directly, but it can sharpen a feeling already present in the work: suspension, imbalance, pause, or pressure. In that sense, the title becomes another part of the composition, but in language rather than paint.
These paintings were made in London, within a particular psychological and atmospheric climate. They now arrive in Los Angeles, where the light, architecture, and cultural tempo alter the conditions of viewing. How do you think place changes the emotional life of a painting?
I understand the question, but do not feel the change from London to Los Angeles has altered the way I view the paintings, at least not yet. Perhaps I am simply too close to the works. What changes my perception more immediately is the architecture and environment in which they are placed, rather than the wider geography: the difference between the studio and the gallery. The studio is also a home environment, where I spend most of my time. The paintings are often on easels, surrounded by materials and other works in progress, and the light moves across the walls in a very particular way. In the gallery, they enter a more distilled environment; the white cube allows them to breathe, and I can see the relationships between the paintings more clearly.
I do think place can profoundly change the emotional life of an artwork, though. I feel this especially with historical painting. Seeing a Titian altarpiece in a museum is very different from seeing The Assumption of the Virgin in Venice, where the architecture, light and ritual context still surround it. The same is true of Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco in Florence; their meaning is inseparable from the cells, corridors and atmosphere they were made for. So while I may not feel Los Angeles has changed the paintings for me personally, I am very aware that the conditions of viewing - architecture, light, geography, sound - can alter how a painting is experienced.
About Poppy De Havilland
Poppy De Havilland (b. 1996, United Kingdom) is a London-based artist. Her paintings focus on moments of suspension, with figures and objects caught in poised, often improbable positions that suggest ritual, rehearsal, or aftermath without settling into a fixed narrative. Marked by compositional restraint, the works draw attention to gesture, balance, and the charged stillness of a single moment.
Informed by the clarity and stillness of early European painting, De Havilland’s work explores how tension builds when action is paused or prolonged. Though the paintings can appear quiet and controlled, they hold a persistent sense of unease, where stillness and strain exist at once.
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