Six Hours in the Tunnel: Painting Lily at Leake Street
There's something different about painting your own daughter.
Every other commission starts with a brief — a reference photo, a wall, a conversation about what the client wants to feel when they walk into the room. Yesterday was none of that. Yesterday was personal.
I set up at Leake Street in Waterloo — the tunnel underneath Waterloo Station that Banksy opened up for legal graffiti back in 2008, and which has been a living, breathing gallery ever since. Walls get painted over. Pieces last days, sometimes hours. It's one of the few places in London where the art is genuinely disposable, and that impermanence forces a kind of freedom you don't always get on a commission.
I wanted to paint Lily.
The Piece
The concept came quickly: Lily in monochrome — pencil-grey, almost sketch-like — emerging from an explosion of colour. The figure rendered with detail and restraint, the background pure energy. Spray paint lends itself to that contrast better than almost any other medium. You can be surgical with it when you need to be, and completely loose when that's what the work demands.
The session ran about six hours start to finish. No projector, no gridding — freehand from a reference I know better than any photo I've ever used. The background colours went in first, wide and fast, letting the paint drip where it wanted. The portrait came after, built up in layers, working from shadow to highlight.
The name — Lily — is written into the background in cursive, half-hidden in the colour. You might not see it immediately. That's intentional.
Why Leake Street
I've painted everywhere from private homes in Buckinghamshire to showrooms in London to a private venue in the Philippines. Every wall carries its own context. Leake Street is different because there's no client, no brief, no approval process. Just you, the wall, and whoever walks past.
A few people stopped to watch. A couple asked questions. Someone's kid stood there for a good five minutes in silence. That's the thing about painting in public — the audience arrives uninvited, and their reactions are always honest.
What It Reminded Me
This kind of work — personal, unpressured, for no one but yourself — is what keeps the technical work sharp. Commissions demand consistency. Free pieces demand risk. Both matter.
If you're a parent and you've ever thought about commissioning a portrait of your child — not a photograph, not a print, but something painted large and permanent on a wall — I'd genuinely love to talk. There's nothing quite like it.
