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Cecilia Reeve Makes Paintings That Move And Animations You Can Step Inside
Cecilia Reeve's innovative approach to blending painting and animation creates immersive experiences that challenge traditional boundaries between mediums. For brand strategy, this highlights the importance of creating multi-sensory and emotionally engaging experiences that resonate with audiences on a deeper level, encouraging brands to explore new ways of storytelling and interaction.
Creative Boom: Inspiration Motion Cecilia Reeve makes paintings that move and animations you can step inside The London-based artist works across painting, animation and installation to conjure whimsical, dreamlike worlds. Written By: Ayla Angelos 2 June 2026 Sleepwalking, 2025 Last October, during Frieze Week, visitors to Soho Revue in Soho could walk into a room and disappear. Sleepwalking – Cecilia Reeve's large-scale animated installation – projected across four layers of gauze, filling the gallery with shadowy figures, drifting birds, glowing fish and shifting interiors that dissolved into one another the way scenes do in dreams.
Some visitors stayed for almost an hour. "Seeing people physically slow down and immerse themselves felt incredibly meaningful," Cecilia says. Cecilia is a London-based painter and animator who has spent the past several years developing what she calls a "painterly language" for moving image – a practice that refuses to treat the two mediums as separate. She studied illustration at the University of Brighton, where she first became interested in how a single image could use composition and colour to communicate atmosphere, before beginning to animate.
She went on to complete an MA in Animation at the Royal College of Art in 2023, where she made her graduate film Porous – a work intense enough to earn her the ArtsThread Global Graduate Prize and a screening at the London International Animation Festival, Aesthetica plus others. Since then, there's been a residency at Soho Revue, weekly painting classes at the Essential School of Painting, a debut solo exhibition of paintings and animations at Twilight Contemporary, and Sleepwalking itself.
Sleepwalking, 2025 Installation shot from Sleepwalking, 2025 Installation shot from Sleepwalking, 2025 Porous, 2023 Her process for both mediums is similar. "Most pieces begin with a feeling or atmosphere that I want to recreate," she explains. From there, she builds a setting, introduces movement – like a hand passing through or a shadow being cast by the sun – and lets the imagery accumulate through layers.
In painting, that means oil applied gradually; in animation, it means hand-painted watercolour and gouache backgrounds, worked over digitally with drawn elements and blending modes that retain the texture and tactility of the physical media. "I'm always trying to push the animation away from feeling overly clean or digital," she says, "so that it holds onto the material presence and the tactility of painting." Sleepwalking evolved over two years of reading, free writing, and collecting, with influences from Peter Pan, dollhouses, and dream diaries.
The animation unfolds almost like a collage of drifting sequences, one scene bleeding into another, with motifs that gradually emerged during production and revealed their emotional importance over time. "I wanted to create something open-ended," Cecilia says, "where symbols and narratives shift depending on the viewer and even change from one viewing to the next." Lipstick by Candlelight, 2026 Sleepwalking, 2025 Echo, 2026 Washing Line, 2026 A recent painting, The Waiting Room, marked a turning point for Cecilia.
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Cecilia Reeve's work represents a significant shift in how art can influence brand experiences, offering fresh insights into multi-sensory engagement that are highly relevant to brand strategy professionals.