Not What They Seem

Seeing the owners of Peacocks Tearooms recently, reminded how supportive they were in 2010 when they set up an Afternoon Tea table for me to paint as part of my research for a work I was doing at the time.

I wanted to contrast two elderly cousins (as symbolised by Afternoon Tea) by the remarkable achievements they achieved during the 2nd World War. One of them had worked at Bletchley Park while the other had been a nude dancer in a non stop show at the Windmill Theatre. Both never spoke of these exploits in later life.

I placed a thin layer of encaustic (semi transparent) wax between the images to separate these two experiences. You can see a detail of the painting ‘Tea For 222’ on my latest Facebook and Instagram posts. It shows both images of a quintessential food experience and the dials of a code breaking machine.