From the Saga Magazine Oct 2009
The ground floor of Linda Meaney's house in Surrey is lush with flowers: enormous rambling roses, pink peonies and poppies so huge you can count the hairs on the stems. "I'd wanted to paint poppies for years." she says of the huge flower canvases that fill a wall.
Each petal is painted with intricate care, her canvas a scrupulous record of veins and stamens. But look again and you realise this isn't quite realism: it's always sunny in Linda Meaney's world. But then, flowers have transformed her life.
Three years ago, she was in charge of replacing windows, as a fed-up architect working for the London Borough of Hounslow. Now, at 51, she's an award-winning artist, with a string of patrons and exhibitions at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. She couldn't be happier. "I've painted every day, seven days a week for the last three years and still feel passionate about it."
Linda was born in Scotland. Her father was the founder of Golden Wonder crisps and the family moved to wherever he was building his latest factory, but drawing was a constant. "I've always drawn from when I could hold a pencil, but being an artist wasn't seen as a proper career. So my parents said, ‘You're good at maths, why don't you do architecture?’"
She studied architecture at University College London, going on to work for a private practice in Richmond, where she met her husband, Peter, also an architect. They went on to have two children (now 19 and 21), plus a hefty mortgage on a large terraced house in St Margarets, Twickenham.
"Then recession hit in the nineties and the practice effectively folded. I was offered two weeks' work for the local authority. I ended up being there 13 years. As a working mum it was ideal, but I felt trapped."
Her reinvention came around seven years ago. She was exhausted by work and her mother took her on a painting holiday to Lake Garda in Italy. There she painted watercolours — and other guests bought them. "I was so excited. I thought, actually, maybe I can make a living out of this. I remember crying myself to sleep. I was so happy."
She cut down her work hours and set up a studio at home. Then four years ago a neighbour asked her to paint a rose for his wife, and her interest grew into an obsession. Her paintings were spotted by a journalist and a sell-out exhibition at the Hicks Gallery, London, followed. "I walked into work the next day and said, ‘That's it. I'm resigning.’"
To create precision, she builds up thin layers of oil paint and works from photographs of the right flower in the right light. For her latest commission — a giant painting of orchids for the Bel Jou Hotel in St Lucia — she visited Kew Gardens. The resulting image (above) is a Vanda orchid and a Phalaenopsis — just two of St Lucia's 20,000 species of orchids.
"There are things I can mock up," she says, "but I can't make up the light." And as she enthuses about the texture given by a shaft of sunlight, she is paying homage to the blooms that have changed her life.
The original article can be found here.