There is a room at East Lancashire Crematorium in Radcliffe where people come to sit with the Book of Remembrance and remember somebody they have lost. It was painted a plain pastel blue.
Andrea Birch, the business leader there, wanted to give families somewhere more comforting than that. I spent three or four weeks in that room.
It began with a tree
It began with a tree. Visitors can add a wooden leaf to it, with the name of the person they have lost written on, so the tree keeps growing as more families come to it. Nobody is ever really finished with grief, and I liked the idea of a painting that is never quite finished either.
Once the tree was up the branches started reaching across the walls, and everything else followed. There is wildlife in among them now, and animals, and people, and nature scenes, and a good deal more besides. There is a squirrel. There is a stag, and a fox down in the roots. There are doves. There are two figures walking away together through a garden gate, which is the part I think about most. And there is a child on a swing.
I painted all of it freehand, without planning any of it beforehand, taking my inspiration only from my mood boards. There is no stopping me once I get going.
What I wanted was to make it magical for the people who needed it. I hope it takes a little of the sadness away, especially for the children, because a child should not have to sit in a plain blue room and be sad in it.
Andrea has said it helped to modernise the room, and that she hopes it brings a smile to their visitors.
Why a room like this one matters to me
I left school at fourteen to care for my younger sibling. Painting became the outlet for all the difficulties I have endured, and it has been ever since. I never had a lesson in my life. My work has hung at the Rossocinabro Art Gallery in Rome and travelled from the Northern Soul Festival in Blackpool to Hebden Bridge and the Printworks in Manchester, and it has helped raise money for The Christie and Children with Cancer along the way.
But a quiet room in a town I know, where somebody can sit with their grief and find a bit of colour in it, is worth as much to me as any of that.
As featured in the Bury Times.