Fiona graham-mackay

Fiona Graham-Mackay (Painter)
Painter Fiona Graham-Mackay (nee Fiona Margaret Bain) born 24 February 1956, Hawick in Scottish Borders. Exhibitor (portrait of Sir Andrew Motion) at 2016 BP National Portrait Gallery summer exhibition. Studied at the Royal College of Art under Quentin Blake and paid her way through RCA working for publishers as an illustrator. On graduating left London for a studio in Paris. In 2000 started teaching as well as painting and opened a studio in Sussex and also taught in Spain and Italy. She took a break to go with a medical charity to Pakistan and the Afghanistan border at the height of that regional conflict. Her most sought painting was of a Taliban fighter. In autumn 2016 she returns to teaching a largely international group in Saragano Italy as well as portraiture in her own studio near Rye on the English south coast.
Since 2006 has included portraiture in her woke including the former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion commissioned by BBC Radio for a programme on her and Motion (broadcast 30 December 2014, repeated June 2016) for the BBC R4 series Poet and Painter with her portraits of Imtiaz Dhakar and Lemn Sissay. In 2016 she painted the round the world sailor Sir Robin Knox-Johnston and her paintings of the late Baroness Thatcher’s foreign secretary Lord Carrington now hangs in London and will be featured in a new biography of the British statesman. Her portrait of Prince Michael of Kent is in the entrance to one of Europe’s most famous yacht clubs where he is admiral. Both Carrington and Kent portraits were exhibited in the Mall Galleries for the spring shows of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.
Shortly before his death in 2013, the Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney unveiled Fiona’s portrait of him and it now hangs in pride of place at the Athenaeum in Pall Mall London.
She has continued her non-portrait career with a two year commission by the entrepreneur Bob Porritt to paint market scenes in the Caribbean island of Antigua. The large canvasses now hang in the Porritt mansion at Anvil Point overlooking the entrance to the yachting centre of Jolly Harbour. She is also artist-in-residence on the Beaulieu Estate and has an exhibition planned for 2017. When not painting Fiona Graham-Mackay skippers her East Coast yacht Mollymawk with her husband, the historian and writer Christopher Lee.

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