Tabby Booth
TABBY BOOTH
Painter of myths, mermaids, and other lodgers of the sea — on selling a company to buy back her own creative life, and turning a former sailors' jail into a home for folk art in Cornwall.
Tabby Booth studied illustration at Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2012 with every intention of becoming an illustrator — and then quietly abandoned that plan almost immediately. Instead, she and her husband James ("Hessy"), also an artist, spent the next decade building Cygnets Art School into a thirty-branch business across the UK. It was, by any measure, a success. It was also, for Tabby, a decade with almost no room left to make her own work.
That changed by accident. In 2023, while scouting a venue for a Cygnets branch in Falmouth, a space came up for rent the very next day — the town's original sailors' jail. She and Hessy walked in and knew immediately it would make a gallery. They took it. Sailors Jail gave Tabby a reason to start painting again, and by the end of 2024 the pull was strong enough that they sold the art school outright, to focus on their own practices and the gallery full time.
Today she works from a converted garage studio in Cornwall, alongside Hessy, their two children, and a rescue pigeon named Raisin who has very particular taste in snacks. Her paintings — dark, folky, unmistakably hers — draw on outsider art, maritime folklore, and a lifelong habit of treasure-hunting antique frames. We sat down with her to talk about risk, ritual, and what ten years of running someone else's creative education taught her about her own.
What are your greatest inspirations or influences?
My inspirations are quite all over the place. I'm hugely influenced by folk art, outsider art… but also things like old signs, textiles and packaging. And of course specific artists too — Bill Traylor was a huge influence on my silhouette style, Modigliani on faces, Edward Gorey on line. And Steve Camps, one of our artists at my gallery Sailors Jail, completely transformed my practice. I'm also really influenced by interiors — always thinking about the life a painting is going to have once it leaves me.
You sold a company you spent a decade building to bet on painting full-time. What did you actually think you were risking?
Security. I'd spent ten years building something that I knew worked, and I knew how to make money from it. Painting was the complete opposite. There was no guarantee anyone was going to buy anything, and I think there was also the fear that perhaps I'd left it too late. I'd spent all that time helping other people make things and building a creative business, but I hadn't really given myself the chance to see what would happen if I put that same amount of energy into my own work.
Sailors Jail was literally a jail. Has that history seeped into how you curate the space, or into your own work?
Definitely into the atmosphere of it. It's a very strange old building and we've never wanted to polish that out of it. The wonky walls and layers of history are part of what makes it unique, even if there are sometimes leaks through the ancient cobblestones outside when it rains!
Steve Camps taught you to build the art for the frame, not the other way round. What did you believe about painting before that, that you don't believe now?
That the painting was the artwork and the frame was something you dealt with afterwards. Now I don't really separate them at all. Nearly all of the frames I use are antique or one-offs, so I'll start with the frame and make something specifically for it. It completely changed the way I work because that creative restriction is such a powerful tool, particularly when my work is so much about composition and how something fits inside a space.
You call your silhouette "signature" — when did you first recognise it as yours, and what did you cut out to get there?
When we first opened Sailors Jail and I came back to creating after so many years, I wanted to really focus on refining a visual language that was recognisably mine. When I looked back at my own work, even from decades ago, that silhouette was a common thread throughout, as well as being the thing that always drew me to others' work. So I went with it.
You've said you want pieces to feel dug up, like relics — but you're also driven by interiors, by how something sits in a lived-in room. Isn't "ancient relic" in tension with "domestic object"?
I actually think that tension is exactly what I like — all the most interesting things in life are about contrast. I don't want the paintings to feel like precious historical objects that belong behind glass. I want them to feel as though they might have existed for hundreds of years and somehow ended up on the wall of your house. My own house is full of old things alongside completely ordinary family life, so I don't really see those worlds as separate. I love objects that carry some mystery but still become part of the everyday.
Ten years running an art school means you spent a decade teaching other people's kids to make things, while not making your own. What did you learn about creativity from the outside that you couldn't have learned from the inside?
Probably how instinctive creativity actually is before we start interfering with it. Children don't really question whether something is their style, or whether it's good enough, or whether somebody else will like it. They just make it. And then gradually all that self-consciousness creeps in. Spending ten years watching children create definitely taught me that a lot of being an artist is actually trying to get back to that place. Making first, judging later.
You run a daily prompt challenge that forces you to post even the work you're unsure about — and you've said strangers often prefer those pieces to the ones you're confident in. What does that tell you about your own judgment of your work?
That my reasons for liking something aren't necessarily the same reasons somebody else will connect with it. There have been so many things I've nearly not posted because I thought they were a bit shit, and then people have absolutely loved them. It's been really useful because it stops me trying to second-guess what people want. Make the thing, put it out there, move on.
the prompt pot, live
Tabby posts a new drawing prompt piece most days on Instagram — the good, the unsure, and the ones that surprise her. Here's a recent one.
Watch on Instagram ↗Raisin the pigeon has pine nuts and opinions. If she could give one review of a finished painting, what would it be?
"Needs more pigeon."
You go car booting and antique fairs "for work." What's the best thing you've ever found that never made it into a piece — the one that's just yours?
I have a little pile of frames in my studio that I've had for so long but are almost too beautiful to use! I also love my collection of antique European carved biscuit moulds — one of my favourite painting collections I've ever done was inspired by them.
Warm lamps, Astier de Vilatte incense, pigeon fed — if that ritual got interrupted one morning, would the painting that day even happen?
Yes! I've got two children, so the ritual gets interrupted constantly. I love creating the right atmosphere and I'm definitely very particular about my studio, but I'm also quite good at just getting on with it. If I waited for perfect conditions I'd probably never make anything.
Anything else?
I think at the moment I'm really interested in creating my own world around the work, rather than just making paintings. Sailors Jail is a big part of that, but so is Cult of Create, the Substack I started this year. It's become a space where I can talk about creativity and being an artist in a much deeper way, but also about the wider idea of living a creative life. My work, my clothes, my house, the objects I collect, the things that inspire me. All of those things feel increasingly connected, and I'm really interested in seeing how far I can take that.
