Collection: Neve Calloway

Calloway spent her twenties bouncing between odd creative jobs — set painting for local theatre, mural work for cafés and record stores — before settling into a full-time studio practice, and that scrappy, make-it-work energy still drives how she paints. Her canvases are built from fast, confident layers, working across the whole surface at once rather than area by area, so a piece might go through a dozen different states before she calls it finished. She's drawn to bold, intuitive mark-making — big brushes, palette knives, sometimes her hands — and treats colour as something to respond to in the moment rather than plan out in advance. She keeps a wall of "unfinished attempts" in her studio that she returns to over months, layering new decisions over old ones. "I don't paint a colour because it matches something," she says. "I paint it because the canvas asked for it right then."