Douglas Greenwood’s words and Avery Norman’s lens capture Ronan Day-Lewis, a 27-year-old artist navigating the frenetic intersection of two major artistic endeavors. He’s currently stationed in a Dublin post-production house, a space usually buzzing with film personnel, which he’s temporarily transformed into his personal art studio. August is closing in, and two crucial deadlines are looming large. Day-Lewis is splitting his days and nights between this makeshift haven and a grading studio across town, relentlessly pushing himself to the limit. Within a mere six weeks, he’s scheduled to unveil "Anemoia," a brand-new collection of his paintings, at the esteemed Megan Mulrooney Gallery in Los Angeles. Not long after that, his directorial debut in feature films, "Anemone," will grace the screens at the prestigious New York Film Festival.
"I honestly don’t know what I was thinking, trying to juggle both at the same time," he admits, his tone a mix of amusement and sheer exhaustion. Oil pastels, bearing the vibrant hues of acidic blues, greens, and violets, are scattered across a nearby table, already showing signs of heavy use. Six of his works are taped to the walls, a temporary exhibition space. "It’s nice, though. It’s almost the complete opposite of filmmaking—so solitary, so reflective." A light chuckle escapes him. "But yeah, my brain feels like a pancake right now."
Until recently, the very same building housed his film editing suite, two floors below his current artistic sanctuary. Once the film crew wrapped up for the day, he would retreat upstairs and lose himself in painting until 11 p.m., sometimes even later. The weekends followed the same pattern: headphones on, a steady stream of shoegaze music filling his ears. He even reveals that one of the figures in "Anemoia" is directly inspired by the girl featured on the cover of Drop Nineteens’ album, "Delaware." "I always gravitate towards chaos," he confesses. It’s entirely possible that this art-fueled frenzy has subtly permeated his work.
"Anemoia"—a word that encapsulates the feeling of nostalgia for a time and place one has never personally experienced—perfectly describes the oil pastel pieces showcased at Megan Mulrooney Gallery. Some are strikingly photorealistic, save for their intense and sometimes jarring color palettes. They evoke a sense of the recent past, like peering through the dusty window of a childhood video store long after it closed its doors. The art feels like a memory you almost have.
The works are a continuation of a project he started over a year prior, but the initial spark of inspiration traces back to the early 2000s. "Each work is mostly based on images found on Flickr from the early 2000s," Day-Lewis explains. One late night, he was on a video call with his friend, Wyatt, and they stumbled upon the same Instagram account: @tvwishes. This account specializes in collecting seemingly unremarkable snapshots taken by amateur photographers. "The images possessed this strange quality, where they didn’t feel entirely contemporary, but they weren’t quite vintage either," he elaborates. The digital timestamps on the images placed them between 2003 and 2007, evoking a feeling, as the title suggests, of a world Day-Lewis had never truly known—a generic Midwestern high school experience, perhaps. This led him down a "wormhole" on Flickr, where he unearthed more of these evocative images on his own. "I ended up discovering this tapestry of images that really resonated with me, and they started to blur together in my mind," he says. "I was no longer just looking at this person’s life from 2004 or that person’s life from 2005. It all coalesced into this soup-like experience."
This "soup-like experience" is how the images ultimately manifest in his art: a peculiar splicing of different photos, placing figures in landscapes they’ve never actually encountered. The works vary greatly in scope. One captures the endless, churning skies looming over suburban rooftops, while another depicts a vast, desolate desert with a young girl wielding a gun in the foreground. There are also helium balloons adorning office ceilings and unguarded moments of women captured in hotel room beds. They are often disconcerting, yet looking at them also evokes a strange sense of comfort, as if they were glimpses plucked directly from our own dreams.
"I’m essentially creating these altars to the memories of strangers, and finding this kinship with them in a way that’s completely fabricated," Day-Lewis reflects. "The more time I spend with certain images, the more I feel like I almost know the people in them."
This fascination with the way time distorts and plays with memory is a recurring theme that links "Anemoia" and "Anemone." However, while creating the exhibition has been a mostly solitary endeavor (seeking advice, he jokes, often opens up "sinkholes" for him), the film involves countless moving parts. He has directed music videos and short films in the past, but never anything on this scale.
Despite the grander scale, it remains a contained and isolating character study, much like the films that captivated his father—the Academy Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis—before he retired from acting in 2017. Daniel returns in "Anemone," both as the lead actor and as the film’s co-writer.
Beyond a vague plotline (an exploration of "the bonds between fathers, sons, and brothers") and the fact that Focus Features and Plan B, the production companies behind acclaimed films like "Moonlight" and "Adolescence," were backing the project, very little was publicly known about "Anemone." This shroud of mystery actually made the shooting and editing processes easier for Day-Lewis. "It’s allowed me to be in slight denial about just how many people are going to see it," he confesses.
"For years before we even started writing, I had this idea that I wanted to write something about brothers," Day-Lewis reminisces. Back in the early days of the pandemic, he initially envisioned it as a coming-of-age story, until he realized that his father had a similar idea brewing in his mind. So, they decided to join forces.
"We had a rough idea of where we were going," Day-Lewis says of the script, "but it was kind of like walking into the dark with a flashlight. Neither of us were even sure exactly if or when it would materialize into a full feature." Together, passing the script back and forth over the course of four years, they meticulously crafted it into what it is now: a film about a self-exiled former soldier named Ray (played by Daniel Day-Lewis), and the circumstances that bring him back into contact with his brother (played by Sean Bean) after a long period of estrangement. Although Ray delivers some powerful monologues, much of the film resides in the unspoken moments they share. It’s a brutal and fascinating project for a father and son to have created together, infused with flecks of the younger Day-Lewis’s eye for abstraction.
Day-Lewis’s affinity for art began in his childhood. He loved drawing and was captivated by the paintings his mother had created in her 20s: images of a "childlike creature" with a triangular head sitting at a table, which hung on his grandparents’ walls. "It was inscrutable to me," he says, "but it possessed this strange power." At the age of five, he saw Ken Loach’s film "Kes," which revealed to him the immense potential of cinematic language. "I feel like I’m always chasing that kind of spirit," he says.
Although his family was primarily based in rural Ireland, his parents’ work occasionally took him to other places. He visited Prince Edward Island during the shoot for "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," and Marfa, Texas, on the set of Paul Thomas Anderson’s "There Will Be Blood." Even as a child, Day-Lewis seems to have absorbed the filmmakers’ spirit, carrying those landscapes into his art.
When he was old enough, Day-Lewis moved to New York, studied art at Yale, and found it to his liking. It was there that he made his first short films and discovered the caustic color palette that would later define his work ("My eyes just slowly adjusted over time, to the point where that palette almost became neutral"). He forged lifelong friendships, met his girlfriend, the painter Lenna Christakis, and became involved in an experimental theater group. "I have never done any other kind of performance," he says. "Twice a week, we would split into groups and devise pieces, then perform them in different spaces around campus. At the end of each semester, we would synthesize the work in a kind of chaotic scramble into a show." Everyone participated in a little bit of everything—including acting. "It was exhilarating, because it was low stakes, basically just for our friends," he says of his brief foray into acting. Is acting in his past? "I think it probably is, yeah…" he says, laughing. Then clarifies, for the record: "Definitely!"
Thankfully, he possesses a multitude of other talents. After the film premieres, Day-Lewis has to begin work on another painting exhibition, scheduled to launch in early 2026. "And then I have a film I really want to make," he says—one that has been on his mind since before "Anemone."
In the studio, a piece of fabric hangs on the wall, bearing a handwritten message that is illegible from where I am sitting. Day-Lewis refers to it as "the seed of something," and says that if he were back in his Brooklyn studio, he would have written it directly onto the walls. Perhaps it’s for the upcoming show—he’s not entirely sure yet—but I ask him to read it aloud:
"The mystery. You looked like you knew something, something, something, some…"
He laughs after reciting it, as if it’s insignificant or easily dismissed. But it carries the very atmosphere that permeates everything he is creating right now—whether it’s a surreal painting of an imagined place or person, or a film about the things that the ones we love leave unsaid.
"Anemoia" runs at Megan Mulrooney Gallery, Los Angeles, until November 1. "Anemone" will have a limited release in North American theaters on October 3, before being released wide on October 10. It will open in UK theaters on November 7.