At 27 years old, Ronan Day-Lewis is making his mark in both the art and film worlds, following in the creative footsteps of his famous parents while carving out his own unique artistic identity. The son of Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis and filmmaker Rebecca Miller recently premiered his directorial debut "Anemone" at the New York Film Festival on September 28th, starring his father in the leading role. Simultaneously, his ethereal landscape paintings are currently on display in a solo exhibition titled "Anemoia" at Megan Mulrooney gallery in Los Angeles through November 1st.

Day-Lewis's artistic journey began remarkably early, starting to draw at just two years old using an Etch A Sketch to repeatedly sketch motorcycles like the one his father owned, erasing the screen and starting over again in an endless cycle. This childhood obsession evolved into his current practice of creating dreamlike landscapes that explore themes of memory and nostalgia. Speaking from Kellogg's Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he has lived for the past three years, Day-Lewis explained that making art has always been about cycling through obsession for him, noting that there was never a question about pursuing painting seriously.

Despite carrying the weight of his famous last name, Day-Lewis's parents deliberately shielded him from Hollywood's spotlight during his formative years. He spent much of his childhood, from ages 7 to 13, in rural Ireland before moving to New York for high school and eventually attending the prestigious Yale School of Art. This diverse upbringing, combined with time spent on various film sets including Marfa, Texas during his father's filming of "There Will Be Blood" (2007) and Prince Edward Island for "The Ballad of Rose and Jack" (2005), deeply influenced his artistic sensibility and interest in landscape as an emotive force.

The concept of "anemoia" - defined as nostalgia for a time you didn't experience - became central to Day-Lewis's current body of work after he encountered the term while browsing Instagram Reels. A particular video featuring a nostalgia edit that stitched together archival footage of 2000s-era classrooms and other half-familiar scenes resonated with him, carrying what he described as a "strange, borrowed intimacy." This concept perfectly aligned with his painting practice, where he draws inspiration from early 2000s Flickr images, describing them as "mysterious snapshots of people's lives that were mundane but also had this loaded narrative potential."

Day-Lewis's paintings feature the distinctive look of early digital flash photography, where everything appears hyper-flattened, reminiscent of his own childhood photos. In his triptych "What we did and where we did it (The Big Gloom)" (2025), spectral figures recline in violet light holding strings of glowing bulbs across their bodies, while a central panel depicts a clouded sky above anonymous rooftops. The work drifts between dream and memory, staging a nostalgia that belongs to someone else, with lurid, washed-out colors that make the scene appear temporary and open to interpretation about whether it's fleeting or decaying.

His desert experiences in Marfa embedded themselves deeply in his consciousness, contributing to what he calls "an interest in landscape as an emotive force" - places that carry both melancholy and the sublime. This sensibility is evident in works like "That Was Then and This Is Now (Death, the Maiden)" (2025), a painting he long envisioned as a teenager with a gun staring down a storm in the desert. Unable to find the exact source image he wanted, he discovered a 1990s album cover showing a girl with a gun that captured the precise feeling he sought, which he then spliced onto a desert landscape to create his reference.

The film "Anemone" emerged from Day-Lewis's desire to explore brotherhood, being one of three siblings himself. The project gained momentum when he discovered his father had been contemplating similar themes after announcing his retirement from acting in 2017 following "Phantom Thread." Beginning in 2020, father and son began collaborating on ideas, eventually developing the story of a man living in self-imposed exile whose estranged brother, played by English actor Sean Bean, arrives unannounced after 20 years apart. Day-Lewis described falling into an "intuitive rhythm" with his father, developing a creative shorthand between them.

Originally conceived as a mostly silent film, "Anemone" relies heavily on landscapes to carry the emotional weight, much like Day-Lewis's paintings. The film fills spaces between dialogue with images of distant storms and lingering aerial views of bustling, verdant forests. This approach allowed Day-Lewis to pull certain elements already present in his painting work - such as narrative leanings and cinematic aspects - naturally to the forefront. The cross-pollination between his two mediums is evident in how he reuses imagery: a dead fish carcass drifting in water appears both in his painting "Wisdom" (2025) at Megan Mulrooney and in one of "Anemone's" final scenes.

With his career ascending in both arenas, Day-Lewis has already secured another solo exhibition scheduled for next year at Nino Mier gallery in Brussels. His work consistently circles memory from multiple angles - whether through paintings created from borrowed snapshots or films that probe dark psychological corners - all asking fundamental questions about how the present is constantly being metabolized into the past. This exploration of temporal relationships and inherited memory positions Day-Lewis as an artist uniquely suited to examine how personal and collective histories intersect in contemporary culture.