The British artist Gill Button paints with a quiet insistence that makes what is seen also what is felt, her images moving in the shadowed space between presence and absence. There is no dramatisation in her work, but a steady, contemplative attention and melancholic patience that allows vulnerability to appear as an ordinary condition of existence.

Much of her material is drawn from the flood of images that pass through social media – snatches of pose, gesture, and the provisional lives people construct for spectators. But she does not merely reproduce these fragments, she translates them, stripping away their staged assurance until they return as something like evidence – traces of longing, fatigue, and the recurring ache of identity under acute observation. To stand before her work is to be asked into an economy of looking that resembles self-interrogation, in which images become meditative surfaces where one’s own place in the world can be reviewed, and deeply felt as fragile, uncertain and insistently human.

GIll’s unique ability to create such emotive canvases from the flotsam and jetsam of our digital image-heavy era, has duly witnessed her exhibit across the globe, and be commissioned by prestigious clients such as Gucci, Vanity Fair, The United Nations and Dries van Noten, and she has, perhaps unsurprisingly, attracted a global cabal of collectors. Here, the self-confessed recluse tells FUTURISTIC DRAGON why every image we are exposed to provides a mirror to our own thoughts and feelings, and explains how she turns experiences of emotional transference into what she calls paintings of the soul.

What are your earliest memories of painting, and when did you know you wanted to be a painter?

I loved drawing as a child and was totally addicted from a very young age – I was always drawing and redrawing and then cutting up and collaging, and just getting through tonnes of paper. I think that the attraction probably had something more to do with the physical sensation of loving to create, and the feeling of the paper and the mark, than it was about wanting to make a pretty picture, or what was being depicted. In terms of wanting to pursue painting as a vocation or career, I knew from the age of about 13 that it was what I wanted. I did a bit of a curveball, though. My art teachers were wonderful, and wanted me to skip foundation and go straight to The Slade, but I was worried everyone would be a year older than me, so I actually did a foundation course in Maidstone. At that point, for some reason, I lost my nerve and felt I should be more sensible and do illustration. I didn’t come from a privileged background at all, and was worried that I would not be able to support myself as a figurative painter – I actually worked as an illustrator for years, until I couldn’t bear doing it any more.