Fiona Graham-Mackay studied at the Royal College of Art under the illustrious Quentin Blake. Even before she left the RCA her work was in demand by leading London publishers. Fiona was and continues to be her own painter.

 

Her painting has been so in demand during the past five years that she has travelled across thousands of miles to fulfil commissions – some of them in less that easy circumstances.  For example, at the height of some of the worst tensions in Afghanistan, Fiona was painting in Pakistan and the Afghan border.  

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At the more comfortable level of painting, Fiona has in the past six years returned to portraiture. Her painting 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.

 

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.

 

Most of her portraits are private commissions often finding a facet in the sitter that even family had never seen. One painting of a former spy had an ex-KGB officer remarking “So that’s who he is!”.