For many makers, there’s no assurance that people will actually buy their work. Melbourne artist Libby Haines is the rare exception. Her richly pigmented oil paintings capture familiar domestic chaos – messy tablescapes, unmade beds – and attract hundreds of eager buyers via Instagram. Most are sold in mere seconds.

Table Manners, her fifth solo show, features a panorama of interconnected dinner party scenes, depicting a “loud and chaotic” home bustling with food and guests. Much like a dinner party host, she has full creative control of the exhibition, from location, framing and printing to catering and drinks.

How did you get into painting?
I studied visual arts at university, but I didn’t think it was possible to get work as an artist, so I went and studied pattern-making and garment construction. I went on to work in production roles in fashion and then I had a jewellery label for five or six years. I stopped the jewellery label around lockdown in 2020. It was around that time that I decided to start painting again because I missed it – mostly painting when my kids were napping.

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I began sharing some of my paintings on Instagram and it just went off. I think it was down to good timing – people were stuck at home scrolling, and I was painting a lot of food and colourful things. It was kind of a perfect storm.

How would you describe your style of painting?
I’d say it’s quite lively. The part that I love the most is the sculptural element of oil paints because they’re quite workable and dry exactly how they look wet.

I like to apply paint really thick, and to get that movement and sculptural feel to the paint – it makes my pieces really textured and vibrant. It always feels like there’s people either in the scene or they’ve just walked out with their presence still there, like there are stains on the tablecloth or they’ve just knocked something over. I love that.

Food is a really common theme in all of your pieces. Why is food your muse?
I love eating and I love cooking, basically. Cooking for people I love and planning my meals and eating out is almost like a form of therapy for me. There’s nothing better than having a good dinner after a bad day. There’s a joy I get from painting food that I just don’t find in other still lifes or landscapes.

What inspires you to start a new piece, and where do you draw your inspiration from?
I always go through phases with colours, so I’ll always start with a palette or tone in my mind that I’ve seen out in the world. When it comes to the scenes I paint, they’re all based off photos I’ve taken on my phone. That’s why the angles are a bit unusual. I’ll combine the photos and do a sketch, then add elements and take things out to simplify it. Sometimes when I can’t think of what to paint I’ll look through my stack of vintage cookbooks from my grandma – those really beautiful ones from the ’70s and ’80s.

You’ve become well-known for selling your pieces via Instagram. Can you talk us through what that looks like?
It’s so wild. When I first began, I’d put a painting up and it would take at least a week for it to sell. Then it was selling in a few hours, and then 10 minutes, and it just kept getting shorter and shorter. It got to the point where 20 people were commenting at the same time and people started getting angry because they thought they were the first to comment. Someone showed me how to check comment posting times down to the second on the Instagram desktop app, so that’s what I do now. It feels very surreal to get this kind of response to your work.

How did your idea for Table Manners come about?
I think I just wanted to challenge myself. I don’t know how I came up with the panorama idea, but I think I liked the idea of doing something that was a bit more technical. I’ve got more people in this one than I ever have, which is hard to paint. I’ve thrown a few big dinner parties over the last couple of years and so I loved the idea of using all this imagery I have and making it into one huge piece that shows the messiness and chaos that comes with having a dinner party.

Table Manners is open to the public Saturday September 14 and Sunday September 15 at AN Studio, Fitzroy. Haines donates 10 per cent of all painting proceeds from her solo shows to causes she cares about. This year, she’s donating to the PARA Foundation.

This article first appeared in Domain Review, in partnership with Broadsheet.