THE SIT DOWN
08: EMILIA MOMEN
Her early relationship with art education was uneasy. At school, rigid briefs left little room to explore, and while her A-level teachers proved formative and supportive, a foundation year at Camberwell had the opposite effect. For Momen, the abrasion was enough to push her away from the system altogether.
She left for Florence to study fashion, but painting never stopped. Crucially, however, before leaving she submitted an oil painting to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. A decision that proved catalytic. The work caught the attention of Ronchini Gallery, who kept tabs on her whilst she was in Florence studying fashion styling, but her focus drifted increasingly towards drawing and painting. Realising she was circling the wrong discipline, she enrolled at Charles Cecil Studios, drawn by its classical foundations. The environment was strict and prescriptive. Again, she found herself misaligned. She left, and this time, didn’t replace it with anything formal.
Instead, she worked alone. Painting alongside everything else, then eventually giving it her full attention. It was only after returning to London that everything converged. Shortly after, Ronchini offered her a first solo exhibition — an opportunity few encounter so early. She stepped into it with little sense of the scale of what was unfolding. That naivety, it seems, was a kind of protection.
Her first solo exhibition with Ronchini, Men About Town, was a quiet arrival that became anything but. The show was a success, and Momen found herself, in and amongst the spotlights of London’s established galleries. Having bypassed art school, much of that world was unfamiliar — and in hindsight, she’s glad she encountered it later, on her own terms.
Momen paints from photographs, which she stages and controls herself. Location, model, clothing, posture — each element is considered before a brush touches the surface. Working in oil on triple-primed linen, she insists on a smooth ground, removing resistance so the focus stays on form, light, and flesh. The process is deliberate, but the impulse behind it is intuitive: a rush of recognition sparked by a pose, a composition, a memory of another painting seen years before.
Her work is rooted in figurative painting, but the subject matter is personal rather than historical. Themes emerge not from theory, but from lived experience — particularly her experience of being a woman. In her ongoing Bathers series, Momen revisits a classical motif long entangled with eroticism and the male gaze. Initially, she didn’t read those references at all. It was only later, through research, that she realised how heavily sexualised the tradition had been. The distance is telling; she doesn’t paint women as passive or performative because she doesn’t see them that way.
As the series developed, so did her awareness of how women inhabit their bodies differently under observation. In works like Ladies by the Lake, the tension between ease and self-consciousness becomes palpable: some figures relaxed, others visibly contorted by learned ideas of beauty. Momen doesn’t instruct the viewer on what to see. She leaves space for interpretation, knowing that meaning is always filtered through experience.
Now London-based, Momen continues to build a practice that resists easy categorisation. Grounded in classical technique but shaped by independence, her work sits in quiet defiance of prescribed routes. If anything runs through it all, it’s control — not over how the work is received, but over how and why it is made.
PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
The last painting that influenced me was Danny Fox’s ‘Bathers’, the brush strokes were so brave, as well as the colour choices in the bodies. Alexandre Cabanel’s ‘Birth of Venus’ influenced me to make my own less submissive paintings of women bathing. I get a surge of passion for art when I go and see paintings by Rothko and Peter Doig. I’m not sure what the driving force is that makes me paint, it’s just that I have to do it, and I’m unsettled if I go for
a few days without painting.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
I have an idea, then arrange photo shoot. I use my phone for photos as the image I want tends to be the split second before the photo is taken, and I can see that image on live photos unlike on a camera still. I then meticulously go through all the photos and sometimes collage two together to get the right composition, which I am quite obsessive about. I paint in sections, like Lucian Freud starting with the most challenging parts, like the eyes. I then start noticing the colours in people’s skin, and lean into that.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
One of my earliest memories was a feeling I had when looking at a painting in a gallery, like an overwhelming excitement and need to get home and create, so I would love my paintings to make someone else feel that way. I’d also like people to feel the emotion of the person I’ve captured in my painting or the scene that they are in, or course we all have different memories that we relate to.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
Peter Doig…. I have heard that he is such a lovely person. I know we’d have a really interesting conversation about colour. I heard him on a podcast recently talking about how he gets through the ‘boring’ parts of a painting, and I loved how honest he was about that. I always felt like I was missing something in myself as most artists talk about how passionate they are about the process…. so I related to Doig’s admission, because there are boring parts especially in very large scale paintings.