Outside, on a busy main street in Streatham in South London, cars whizz, people shout, buses puff, and life, as messy and noisy as it gets in 2014, carries on, but indoors, in a small bright studio, painter Sigrid Holmwood is at work, hearkening back to an era before cities, as we know them, existed. 

A painter in an art world preoccupied with new media, video and digital innovation, Holmwood embraces her archaic methods completely, inventing  a persona of a ‘peasant painter’ and making all the paints she uses in her work from scratch, boiling up the coloured concoctions on a two-ring hob. 

‘I have this kind of persona that I call the ‘peasant painter’, so, obviously, that sounds completely bonkers,’ the 35-year-old explains cheerfully. ‘But this practice came about because painting gets a lot of flak in the contemporary art world, or it certainly did when I was at art college [The Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford followed by the Royal College of Art], for being irrelevant and old-fashioned. So then I thought, yes, well maybe that’s what is really interesting about painting – it is a very old practice and this crappy handmade thing in this world of shiny polished perfect images. Maybe that’s why people are interested. So I decided to go the whole hog with making my pigments.’

Inspired by the peasant painters of Europe, by the work of Breugel and Van Gogh, and the art of the Swedish peasants (Holmwood is half-Swedish, half-Scottish), she creates work that depicts a life before the Industrial Revolution, a life of handicrafts and early agriculture. Using bright, vibrant colours – ‘Natural paint doesn’t have to mean beige,’ she says – she portrays a world that she imagines via summer holidays spent in remote Swedish villages and the activities she and the rest of the rest of the re-enactment group she is a member of get up to at the weekends.     

‘We’ll go and spend a weekend sleeping in a museum, literally on straw mattresses,’ she says when I ask her for details on the re-enactment group. ‘We don’t pretend to be in the olden days, we don’t speak ‘oh oooh-er’ but we are demonstrating various crafts and how things were done, like the cooking or whatever.’ 

‘People in the group are accountants and IT consultants and civil servants. It’s a little pocket of resistance – you don’t always get to do the thing you want to do when you grow up because money means you have to do a job.’

Holmwood, however, is one of the lucky ones, a person who has managed to make a career out of her passions.  ‘When I was kid, I said I wanted to be an archaeologist, an artist or a biologist and I just found a way of being all three at once,’ she says. ‘When you realise you’re doing what you wanted to be as a kid, that’s a good sign, artistically. When I teach at art schools, I always say every weirdy beardy interest that you’re into should be part of your work.’

Her career is a successful one and she is invited to show her work and participate in art projects all over the world – she has learned how to make paper with shamans as part of a residency in China  and she’s currently developing a dye garden in Spain. Art collector and arbiter of good taste when it comes to all things contemporary art, Charles Saatchi, has snapped up some of her paintings but Holmwood, laughing, warm, good-natured and jolly, remembers a different type of collector entirely when she talks about the various places her work has ended up.

‘This one couple bought one of my works and they sent me a photo of themselves dressed up like the two farmers in you know the ‘American Gothic’ [by Grant Wood] painting. They’d bought a farm in Bavaria and they sent a photo of themselves dressed up in their farm and called it 'Bavarian Gothic' and I thought they’re kindred spirits obviously,’ she says before breaking into wild guffaws at the thought of it. 

‘Do people ever say that you’re eccentric?’ I ask her, after she tells me about meeting her Spanish martial artist boyfriend on a Zen painting retreat.  ‘Em, maybe they say it behind my back. I don’t know. I think of myself as incredibly normal really. Although I know my family, when I go off one on, will yawn and go, 'OK boring.' I’ve been called an anorak more than anything.’ 

It’s true: she can talk nerdily, passionately and at length about almost any subject, alighting at art, film, anthropology, the vagaries of human nature, her favourite Chinese restaurant, and there is something of that in her work, a keenness for what it means to be human, an intelligence, an awareness, that makes her paintings so much more than just beautiful artefacts.