“It’s the wild west here,” says artist Heather Chontos as she shoos away two chickens that are pecking at the carrots growing in her vegetable garden. When she bought the 3.5 acres in Portugal’s Serra de São Mamede nature park five years ago, there was only a stone ruin to call home. That building is now her studio; the rustic, unimposing house alongside it is one she built herself, its wooden facade painted the colour of the surrounding rocks scattered across the jagged, moss-covered landscape.
Along with the hens, she shares the plot with her daughter, five dogs and three horses. But its transformation is far from over: Chontos is in the process of regenerating the land. It is currently populated with protected cork oaks and more than 200 fruit trees — figs, pomegranates, oranges and peaches — planted by Chontos herself.
Hers is a life spent outside. Meals are eaten under the shade of a leafy canopy, and her huge, colourful abstract paintings are finished out in the fields. “What inspires me the most is the light here and the way it shifts — that plays a big part in how I see colours,” she says. The weather can be erratic, but even at its most tempestuous, Chontos pulls on a pair of boots and heads out. “Half the year it looks like Ireland because it’s so green and luscious. In autumn, you can get horizontal rain; summers are hot and dusty.”
The work she creates here — dynamic gestural paintings in bold colours — reflect the liveliness of the landscape. She has exhibited in Shanghai and Los Angeles, and had her work translated into homewares via a recent collaboration with rug-maker Layered; a new design is being released in January.
But it’s not all glamour: “Because I’m an artist, people think I just paint, drink martinis all afternoon and smoke a pack of cigarettes,” she laughs. Her days start early, tending to her animals, frequently with a tool belt and drill in hand to mend fences the horses have kicked down. “It’s true there’s an enormous amount of freedom, but it requires enormous dedication and physical labour.”
That love of the outdoors spills into the home. Although everything is carefully chosen — no item is out of place — edges are a little wonky, nothing feels mass produced, and natural materials are celebrated. “I want everything to have that feeling of slight imperfection because perfection is boring. I can’t even walk into Ikea, it makes me want to vomit,” she laughs.
Handmade and found objects are a testament to her ingenuity and resourcefulness. She concocts plant-based dyes in the outdoor kitchen; the floors are stained grey with oak galls and iron oxide; a peachy-pink stool was dyed with avocado skins. Curtains were crafted from a patchwork of fabrics sourced at a local market, as were the traditional Portuguese striped blankets on her bed. Feathers and magnolia pods are dotted round the spaces; on a shelf sits a bird’s nest woven with the silver hair from her horse, Emeerah.
She has built door frames and shutters, an outdoor shower and a pergola from mimosa and eucalyptus sticks. If not made by her, then it still has to be hand made by somebody. She enlisted her father, a carpenter, to build the stables, though she denies learning her woodworking skills from him. “We can’t work together — he’s technical and precise, whereas I’m very whack-a-mole and artsy-fartsy,” she says.
Chontos grew up in an old farmhouse in the Hudson Valley, “a child of apple picking, sugar maples and pumpkin patches”, she says. “Here it’s cactus and olive trees — the opposite of everything I have known. I love that.” Chontos left the US to study art history at University College London, after which she worked as a prop stylist and set designer, then as the art director for British fashion photographer Corinne Day until her death in 2010.
Aged 30, she made the decision to commit fully to being an artist. “I always just wanted to paint, but I was really scared to admit it,” she says. “It felt like such an indulgence given I was a single mother with a baby and a 10-year-old. But once I did, it felt like the thing I was always meant to do.”
No longer stuck wherever her employer was, she bounced between cities including New York, Barcelona and Berlin but soon sought space and solitude, fixing up an 18th-century house in the countryside near Bordeaux. Even that area soon felt too crowded. “I literally googled what the least touristy, most beautiful, natural part of Portugal was, and the region I’m in now came up as number one,” she says.
In 2020, she packed up her daughter and dogs into a caravan and drove to the municipality of Marvão — “we were completely blown away” by the landscape, she says. The home itself? Not so much.
For almost a year, Chontos and her daughter lived in a tiny, temporary dwelling — relying on solar panels, a nearby fountain for water and an Airbnb for a hot shower — even as she prepared for exhibitions and spent a month on scaffolding painting a 17th-century ceiling in Paris. When it eventually came to building the main house, she opted for a prefabricated design in compressed wood. “It’s like a kit; you order the design from Austria and they come and assemble it in just a week, it’s insane,” she says. “I then erected a connecting wall between the house and studio so they don’t look like two aliens trying to cohabit.”
Today the home is as much a part of her artistic output as her canvases. Sculptures made from remnants of wood march up the exterior and interior walls. Colour-saturated murals flow throughout: one covering her bedroom ceiling is a reimagining of the starry night sky. “I have to draw on everything, it’s like some sort of sickness,” she says. “I can’t let things go — if something doesn’t feel right or balanced, I have to change it then and there” — whether it’s an artwork or piece of furniture. “It’s completely intuitive and spontaneous. I wouldn’t say there’s any underlying meaning.”
When painting, Chontos uses unconventional tools: a plastic hotel key card, a kitchen spatula, a piece of glass. “I feel like a brush removes me from the paint. I like the scraping motion you get with a card, it’s direct and as close as I can get to finger painting — I’m basically a giant five-year-old,” she laughs.
This experimentation extends to materials; she’s currently drawn to old paper — a worn French-Greek dictionary lies open in her living room, the pages decorated with her drawings — and antique fabrics such as heavy linen Portuguese flour sacks. For her recent exhibition at the Finch Project in London in September, she painted on vintage Moroccan cushion covers that she had stitched together.
Collaborations allow her to work across a variety of textures. One of the vibrant, hand-woven rugs she created for Layered lies in front of her wood-burning stove and she has previously partnered with French fabric brand Pierre Frey, designing prints that now adorn the cushions on the patio bench, and a chaise longue that sits in the middle of a field like a sculpture. “I have created a lot of little lounging spots with the hope I might actually lie down and read a book at some point. But I’m a doer not a reader, I’d rather plant 20 trees,” she says.
Still, all that effort poured into her home has paid off: “I’ve travelled my whole life, but now what inspires my work is staying put.”
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