Villa of Livia Installation

The Villa of Livia garden fresco, painted for Livia Drusilla, wife of the Emperor Augustus, is among the most seductive wall paintings that antiquity has left us. Painted between approximately 30 and 20 BCE to adorn a subterranean triclinium at the villa's Prima Porta site, it depicts an impossible garden: a tangle of laurel, quince, strawberry tree and oleander inhabited by thrushes, blackbirds and wood pigeons. I had long admired it from a distance; this commission gave us the chance to scrutinise it at length.

When the owner of a large Notting Hill house required a solution for a two-storey stairwell wall left exposed during a substantial rebuild, his art consultant Emma Rutherford approached  us to develop proposals. Working in liaison with architects Hackett Holland, we arrived at an adaptation of the Livia fresco scaled to the demands of the site.

The difficulty was one of proportion. The surviving original stands only approximately 2.5 metres high, but our client's wall was nearly 6.5 metres. To make the composition work at this unprecedented scale without simply repeating or mechanically enlarging the original, I rebuilt the design in Photoshop: layering and extending treelines upward, adding expanses of sky, flipping trees and repositioning birds until the balance felt right.

The finished work was executed as twenty-four fresco secco panels, hand-plastered and hand-painted at my Hastings studio, each mounted on wood battened aluminium panels. This method meant the installation could be completed without any direct painting on site, preserving the integrity of the architectural shell. The panels cover the full height of the stairwell wall, recreating the sensation of the original enclosure: a garden that seems to exist just beyond the reach of the interior.

The fresco secco panels in my Atelier are made using the same technique as the Villa of Livia commission: hand-plastered hessian, chalk paint, beeswax. Smaller in scale, ready to take home.