Mercedes McLaren Grand Prix dinner

This was such an exciting project. Art and design can take you to such great places and this particular experience would have to be one of the outstanding life destinations…

I guess the event preset the mood. I had a brilliant team working with me, one of whom was Theo… yes again. Each of these fabric canvases (yes, fabric) was approximately four mt wide. The idea, thanks to darling Damian Crock, was to paint from behind the screen so the paint bled through the fabric and the image revealed itself to the 1,000 guests dining at the Crown Palladium Ballroom over the course of the night’s dinner.

Live painting of Formula One Kimi Raikkonen's car 2004

How do you teach everyone in your team to draw like you? Colour by number! Yes, days before the dinner the darling Crock team projected my drawings in their massive Richmond studio so I could draw outlines of each formula 1 car onto the ‘canvas’. I numbered each and every bit and corresponded the numbers to buckets of pre mixed paint. It worked perfectly.

And the highlight (as if I needed one), for Theo and I to officially begin painting, both Juan Pablo Montoya and Kimi Raikkonen had to greet Theo and I and sign the canvases (before they went back to their rooms in prep for the next day’s Grand Prix… they missed the party!!)