Mille Fiori 2026

Oil and mixed media on panel in antique frame with hand painted detail 

51 x 42cm  The stated size includes the frame. The Panel size is 27 x 19cm 

Another painting from the new series is on the easel today. This one's called Mille Fiori: a thousand flowers.

The series keeps circling the same questions. How we take in pattern without noticing it. How it's handed down. How the things in the background of a childhood end up shaping you.

My commissioned portraits start from a real person and work outward, so the pattern and symbols follow their life and what matters to them. Here there's no real person to answer to. My sitter is invented, pieced together from old family photographs and pictures pulled from magazines and the internet. I chose that on purpose. Without a true story to look after, I can follow the idea as far as it wants to go.

Underneath it all I'm thinking about my mum, and about myself, and about growing up when girls were meant to be seen and not heard. So the flowers do the talking. They can be lovely, or a little unsettling, or close to suffocating.
 

You can see other new work here or in the menu headings.