In Conversation · London
Raine Storey PAINTING THE HIDDEN LANGUAGE OF EVERYDAY SURREALISM
A Canadian-born, London-based oil painter on inherited dreams, open-heart surgery, and why she hides layers in her canvases like inside jokes with the world.
Artist Details
Recent AccoladesLondon Art Biennale · British Arts Prize People's Choice Award
The Lineage
A Grandfather,
A Surrealist,
A Studio in the Garden
There are artists who discover surrealism in galleries. Raine Storey discovered it by cutting her grandfather's grass. As a teenager in Canada, afternoons spent mowing Derek Woodhead's lawn ended in his studio — where she received her first painting lessons, surrounded by the work of a man who had spent a lifetime in the surrealist tradition as an English Fine Colour Printer and artist.
The connection between her grandfather's practice and her own wasn't immediately legible to her. It was there in the atmosphere, in the accumulation of his oeuvre around her childhood, but it took until this year — a final visit together to the Dalí Museum in Florida — for it to crystallise with precision. Looking at Dalí's canvases with her grandfather beside her, she visually recognised for the first time the thread that had always run from his work to hers: clever concepts and hidden imagery, passed down without either of them quite naming it.
Following in his footsteps she moved to London, where she now holds a residency with The ARX Gallery, preparing for a solo show. The journey from his Canadian studio to a gallery in London is, in a way, the shape of the inheritance.
The Dalí Connection
Storey describes the visit to the Dalí Museum in Florida with her grandfather as the moment she finally understood the lineage. Standing before Dalí's hidden imagery and conceptual precision, she saw how those same instincts had passed — unconsciously, organically — through her grandfather Derek Woodhead's work into her own.
"The more time you give my pieces, the more you will get back."
— Raine StoreyThe Hidden Architecture
Three Seconds
or a Lifetime —
Your Choice
Storey became inspired by a troubling statistic: the average gallery visitor spends fewer than three seconds in front of a work of art. Rather than surrender to that fact, she decided to make it the conceptual engine of her practice.
Her paintings are designed in layers. The first layer is what any visitor will see in those three seconds — a strong theme, a clear composition, an initial emotional register. But beneath that surface, she has already formed additional nuances, secondary meanings, hidden references. "Like an inside joke with the world," as she puts it.
The more you stay, the more emerges. And she also leaves things deliberately incomplete — the viewer is invited to position themselves within the gap, to construct their own meanings and then check them against hers. It is a genuinely dialogic practice.
Surface Layer
What the three-second viewer sees
A strong theme. A clear composition. The initial emotional charge — enough to hold attention or let it pass.
Middle Layer
What the patient viewer discovers
Nuances and embedded references. Meanings that accumulate as attention accumulates. The inside joke begins to surface.
Deep Layer
What the viewer brings themselves
Intentional incompletion — space left for the observer to project, to create, to see if their meaning converges with the artist's.
On the Role of the Abstract
Beyond the thematic layers, the abstract elements in Storey's paintings occupy a distinct and more complicated register. They involve what she calls complete creative licence — brushstrokes that play many roles simultaneously: evoking the ineffable feelings that surround the realistic elements, tying and balancing the composition, or in her most recent work, dissolving directly into the realist elements themselves.
This blur — between the abstract and the real, the planned and the spontaneous — is not merely stylistic. It maps directly onto how she has learned to live. "The abstract leads the dance," she says, and one senses she means this as much about life as about painting.
On Technology & The Art World
The Contemporary
Cavewoman
Q
How are current trends in technology and innovation affecting your work?
People have been painting on walls since the stone age — the Paleolithic period extends the earliest known use of stone tools covering most of technological prehistory. In a way, not much has changed. I am just a contemporary cavewoman embracing tech and innovation, trying to think outside the conceptual cave to survive.
For Storey, technology is an opportunity — a way to push the boundaries of her medium, to explore new mediums, to reach audiences her grandfather could not have imagined. But it never displaces the central thing: the visceral, tactile reality of oil on canvas. The technology changes. The hand does not.
On the Art World's Divide
Commercial vs Fine Art
Storey was selling work as a student at Queen's University. Rather than celebrate this, her professors labelled her a commercial artist and denied her awards on that basis. She was told to leave the programme. Only one professor, Sylvat Aziz, offered anything different.
She enrolled in Sotheby's Art Business Masters programme, reasoning that was where she belonged. Then she fell seriously ill — and in the clarity that illness brought, she realised that creating was not optional for her. It was the thing. "Life is too short to care what others think is right for you."
Her Argument
Storey would like to see the divide between commercial and fine art dissolve. In her view, art should not carry a negative connotation simply because it involves commerce — that is, after all, the condition of virtually all art outside public institutions.
On Wellbeing
What Open-Heart
Surgery Taught Her
About Letting Go
A few years ago, Raine Storey had open-heart surgery. It changed her perspective in ways she is still discovering in her work. Before the surgery, she was a very realistic painter — everything planned, everything executed with control. The abstract elements she now considers central to her practice were barely present.
Recovery offered a different relationship to precision. She became less detail-oriented — in life and in art. The balance she now strikes between realism and abstraction, between planning and going with the flow, is not just aesthetic preference. It is a kind of ongoing vital sign. "You can visually judge how balanced my life is by looking at my current works," she observes — with the lightness of someone who has genuinely stopped pretending control is the same thing as living.
Art, for Storey, is inseparable from wellbeing in the most literal sense. Even difficult periods become material. Even challenging times press her toward her best work. The canvas is where the inner and outer worlds meet — and where what cannot be said in words finds its form.
On Commissions
Storey accepts a limited number of commissions each year, drawn to the personalised themes and the ongoing dialogue they create. A recent commission wove family motifs — including the client's goat as a bartender pouring champagne into a signature shoe — into the work. The client later reported still discovering elements emerging from the abstraction long after delivery. "It is such a treat for me to hear that the work continues to have a dialogue."
"I live to create — it took falling very ill to have the perspective that life is too short to care what others think is right for you."
— Raine StoreyFind the Work
A Surrealist
Worth Staying For
Raine Storey is currently in residence at The ARX Gallery in London, preparing for a solo show. She will return to her Canadian studio in late summer to complete the series. She takes commissions — and the personalised inside jokes she builds into them are, by all accounts, inexhaustible.
Commissions & Available Works
To enquire about available works or to set up a commission, contact The ARX Gallery directly. For updates on upcoming exhibitions and new work, follow the artist on Instagram.
Raine Storey The ARX gallery studio
Airport Insecurity, 2022
Oil on canvas
260 x 120 cm
Raine Storey in The ARX gallery studio
