Owen Gent is a British artist and illustrator known for his expressive, narrative-driven imagery. Blending traditional painting with contemporary illustration, his work explores emotion, symbolism, and storytelling and has been featured across international editorial, publishing, and cultural projects.

Your work feels like stills from a dream what makes an image cinematic to you?
I try and create paintings that feel like a stolen moment from a much larger story or sequence, rather than an arranged tableau of people and objects. I suppose to me a cinematic image is one that feels like we're being given a single, secret moment of a whole that we'll never fully see but can completely feel.

Do you think in stories or in moods when you paint?
If I'm working on illustrating an article or a book where the story already exists, I'm very much thinking in terms of that persons story or the authors underlying point or intention. In my personal work however I really relish trying to avoid narrative completely, at the start at least, in this instance I'm almost always trying to find that rare, reflective moment where beauty and melancholy meet.

Which filmmakers or films inspire your visual world?
I always come back to Andrej Tarkovsky's films, especially Stalker, The Mirror and The Sacrifice - his sense of space, symbolism and empathy are just stunning and it's rare to find a director with such an uncompromising vision.

How do light and silence shape your work?
Light and space are crucial to my work as they give my paintings shape, a sense of place and therefore solidity. I use the word 'space' instead of 'silence' because I suppose that's the visual equivalent right? It's another thing that Tarkovsky does so beautifully, he let's open space and time do the talking rather than filling every moment.

What emotion do you chase most in your art?
I'm not sure if this is an emotion but a sense of weightlessness and of being suspended is something I really enjoy creating in my work - safe but falling. With commissioned work I suppose empathy is what I want people to find, the aim is always to make the viewer feel what the subject - and there's almost always a figure or a being of some sort is feeling.

Where do your stories begin memory, love, or imagination?
Most pieces that are completely my own start with some fragment of memory and I guess a memory is treasured because of love. There's something uncomfortable in the word imagination, it suggests that everything is dreamt up suddenly and then transcribed to paper, the process feels more like feeling your way in the dark - you add a line or a shape and if it feels wrong you step back and keep trying until that mark feels right and you can move to the next one.

How do you translate a feeling into color?
Subconsciously, at least that's the hope and it isn't always possible when working with clients. If a feeling is honest then the colours already in you somewhere, you just have to feel it out.

What does “cinema” mean to you beyond the screen?
Something expansive, epic and consuming.

If your art had a soundtrack, what would it sound like?
I hope it's a beautiful, endless and ever changing ambient drone of voices and strings, though I suppose that's up to whoever is experiencing it.

What story do you want people to feel in this issue?
I'm not sure if that's up to me to say, though I always hope that my work makes someone feel or remember a feeling they've already had or forgotten - one of the beautiful things about art is it's ability to summon nostalgia.