MILLIE SMITH. Oil & Acrylic on Canvas, 75.0 x 51.4 cm
June 2026

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Sebastian, Fir Grove Garden began with a photograph I took in a Hampshire garden in the summer of 2021. It shows my ten-month-old son seated on the grass in a soft blue denim sun hat. I was drawn to the quiet composition — his gaze off to the right, the gentle natural light and a single dandelion providing a bright, simple focal point in the foreground. A fun feature of the picture is a tiny black bug on his toe, which I kept in the final portrait. 

The project was conceived as a dual portrait: I painted one canvas and then painted the second immediately afterwards to see how the two executions might diverge. Although I intended them to differ, after six days of preparation and painting, they resolved into two almost identical images. The distinctions are subtle — small shifts in facial detail, a slightly darker bodysuit on one piece, and modest variations in the stripe colours — but those little differences are precisely what I find most revealing.

More behind-the-scenes photos, studies and process films are available on my Instagram and on the blog at my website.