ARTIST INTERVIEW: THOMAS HOULIHAN – WINNER OF THE CASS ART DRAWING AWARD, RDS DRAWING YEAR 2025

The Drawing Year is the Royal Drawing School’s full-scholarship postgraduate-level programme designed to offer artists and creatives a transformative next step in their practice. Thomas Houlihan received The Cass Art Drawing Award at the 2025 Drawing Year showcase. We caught up with Thomas to find out more about his work…

Hi Thomas, it’s great to speak with you! Tell us a bit about your creative journey so far. 

Hello! My name is Thomas Houlihan and I am an artist from Glasgow. I studied fine art at DJCAD in Dundee before moving to London for the Drawing Year.  

Tell us about your time on the Drawing Year Programme at the Royal Drawing School. What was it like, and how did your work develop throughout the year? 

The drawing year picked me up and spun and shook me all around. It expanded my frame of reference to the point where I didn’t know what I liked, nor did I know what I wanted to make for a long time. Before the Drawing Year, I had been making these large-scale imaginative landscapes with silhouetted figures floating around in them, they were very moody and there certainly was an atmosphere, but I think I was adding in these limbless forms because I actually didn’t have the technical aptitude to construct them ‘accurately’.  

Through the range of different classes at the drawing school, I developed a skillset and confidence to allow me to dive into my own head and translate personal, lived experience onto my surface. I think that daily observational study has truly changed my life and has given me the tools to expand my practice much further. 

What is a typical day in the studio like for you? 

Rarely is a day typical, but, if I was starting something new, often the process would involve some sort of play with abstraction on a white surface. Moving paint around with very thin washes and removing it again, over and over, until some form or shape reminds me of a memory, a dream, or perhaps a drawing I’ve made previously. I try not to pin something down before I make it, I like to have the freedom to change the picture as it's being developed and respond intuitively to the process. 

Sometimes, the painting will then inform a drawing or vice versa, and maybe there is a recurring theme that I’m interested in, and I’ll try to make the same picture a few times, seeing how it inevitably changes. 

Your work seems to have a very strong sense of narrative. What inspires you, and are there any other artists whose work you admire?

It’s hard to avoid cliches talking about inspirations, but I am genuinely inspired by everything ever, all the time, all the way. I do agree that there is a sense of narrative, I’ve always liked reading fiction, and have a wonderful respect for the storyteller, in any format, so I enjoy leaving (or withdrawing) elements in my pictures that make for an intriguing narrative. It can be fun to play with the ambiguity of a picture.  

As for artists, I like the whole bloody lot. At the moment, I’m looking at Andrew Cranston, Edvard Munch, Pierre Bonnard, Cherry Pickles, Alice Neel, Prunella Clough, and anything that will catch my eye. 

I also take my inspirations from music, poetry, film, dance, anything. 

Can you explain the themes in your work and how you explore these in different pieces? 

I think the themes in my work vary often. Sometimes, months after being made, they’ll reveal something to me that I wasn’t aware of in the first instance. There is a lot of work about interpersonal relationships, desire, loss, guilt etc. I’m interested in socio-political structures and religion. I’d say most of the work tries in some way to encapsulate the very unique feeling of being alive in this modern age that is so wonderfully complicated, beautiful and yet completely and utterly despairing at the same time. 

Your final show was a display of multiple small-scale works, in various media. Tell us about the different materials you use, and do you have any tips and techniques on drawing to share?

A lot of the pieces made for this show were with whatever I had to hand in the moment, there was a brief that loosely required us to make drawings, rather than paintings, and I had been enjoying playing with colour relationships at the time, so I leaned towards colour pencils for most of it. I have no tips or tricks to share, but for me, it was always important to start by creating a sense of atmosphere and going from there.  

Do you have any advice for future art students applying for the Drawing Year?

The only advice I have for future students applying to the drawing year is to try and demonstrate that drawing is fundamental to your thinking process. I’ve seen lots of different practitioners come from different backgrounds, and it was the process of drawing that united all of them. 

And finally, what’s next for you? 

What’s next for me? I wish I knew. I’m excited to make more, to study more, to keep expanding my practice and my ideas.

See more of Thomas’ work at thomashoulihan.com , follow him on Instagram @tomhoulihan_

Feeling inspired?

Read more artist interviews on the Cass Art blog here.

Submit your application to the Royal Drawing School’s full scholarship postgraduate-level Drawing Year programme by 1 April. Full details here.