My work is in the collections of the Royal Family, having been privileged to receive a commission to create two paintings
as a gift for His Royal Highness Prince William and bride Princess Catherine on the event of their Royal Wedding.
The paintings would have been created ‘En Plein Air’, painted in situation outdoors.
They were based on the flower borders in the grounds of Riddlesworth Hall School, where Diana, Princess of Wales
attended the school. These would be the same gardens that a young Lady Diana Spencer would have explored as a pupil.
This commission developed into permission to create as many paintings as I would like in the grounds, therefore I now have
A wonderful collections of paintings that are in the same technique and appearance as the Royal Commission,
created in the very same flower gardens.
In respect of the NFT artspace, these paintings are digitised for the blockchain and they are also PFP NFT’s,
This means they are Proof of Physical Presence NFT’s.
When purchasing the digitised NFT it will be linked to the physical world by these very special paintings, allowing
buyers further proof of ownership.
Since these assets are intrinsically linked to the physical counterpart, they give complete security and assurances to the
buyer as they cannot be replicated, in the way that some digital art can.
In addition to the above, His Royal Highness, William, The Prince of Wales, and his brother Harry, The Duke of Sussex,
jointly own a painting that I created.
You can see in the photographs below one of the paintings I worked on in the gardens and the same painting hanging in
the main hall of Riddlesworth Hall.
Another aspect to this collection is that during the time spent living and working with the paintings another form
of insight began to evolve, inspired by something my mother once told me about.
After the very sad news of Diana, Princess of Wales passing away, my mother recalled to me how she visited
London to pay tribute and view the many many thousands of bouquets of flowers left by mourners at Buckingham Palace.
My mother, Nancy, said to me walking to the palace, the air was full of perfume before you could even see the huge floral tribute.
I began to think about how an artist might try to capture that idea of the perfume of the bouquets being so strong that you could sense
the flowers before you could see them.
I imagined the flowers in the multicoloured plastic wrapping from the florist, some of them fresh, some beginning to decay and
merge with the plastic.
The potency of my mums description of the perfume led me to continue to work on these paintings, that had effectively already been
completed in the flower gardens of Riddlesworth Hall, in a more vibrant way, maintaining high notes of saturation in the colouring to
emulate the perfume.
Then in the studio I began to experiment with thin layers of coloured polyurethane resin to imbue the works with the feelings
and visuals of the coloured wrapping being a part of the floral tributes.
I believe the outcome to be quite unique and beautiful, yet at the same time because of the freedom of expression in my brushstrokes,
the confident mark making, there is a physicality, a spontaneity to them that speaks of hope, of a bright tomorrow.
The stage and catwalk designer for the late Vivienne Westwood, his name is Robert, once said to me after seeing the whole collection together.
That he had seen so much art in galleries over the years, yet when he walked into my studio and saw these paintings he said -
“they give life, they oxygenate the room”, a nice thing to say, thank you.
So with Mothers Day just a matter of day’s away as I write this.
These paintings appearing on my very first website, are my Mothers Day gift to my Mum.
Perhaps one day a fine gallery, such as Compton Verney in Warwickshire, where I grew up might exhibit them,
and my Mum can visit to see the collection of paintings together, inspired by her words.
Life can present us with some strange coincidence’s, or perhaps we can call it serendipity.
I’ve learnt that, although now retired, my Mum professionally was a health carer, one of the ladies that she looked after, just a few miles
from where I write this, was actually young Lady Diana’s chaperone at Riddlesworth Hall, where these canvases were painted.
She looked after Lady Diana, and my Mum looks after her in her old age.
