'I come from a family of mavericks': Max Denison-Pender on painting Boris's nurse and an erupting volcano

For a young artist, Max Denison-Pender is certainly adept at getting himself noticed. The 23-year-old, who left school at 16 to pursue his dream of being a painter, has painted next to an erupting volcano, with dangerous gas alarms going off beside him; amid the blur of punches in a boxing gym with then world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua; and on the steps of No 10 Downing Street. But it was an assignment relating to the occupant of that famous address which really hit the headlines last year.

It was back in April 2020, when Boris Johnson, after surviving a worryingly close call with Covid-19, personally thanked two nurses, “Jenny from New Zealand” and “Luís from Portugal”, who “stood by my bedside for 48 hours, when things could have gone either way”. Both had taken care of the Prime Minister after he was admitted to intensive care at St Thomas’s Hospital, in London, and both later accepted a hand-written, hand-delivered invitation from Denison-Pender to sit for a portrait to raise money for the NHS.

Jenny McGee, from Invercargill on the South Island, says it was a “complete shock – I wasn’t given any warning” when her name was mentioned in dispatches to the nation. “I had to go to work that night,” she tells me by phone from the Caribbean, where she has been working in recent months. Journalists had begun turning up at her home, and “my boyfriend was ringing saying, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ I actually got quite panicky and it was all a bit scary.”

She decided to turn off her phone but woke next morning to find her friends asking her why she hadn’t responded to New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who had told television viewers back home that she had reached out to her fellow Kiwi but hadn’t had a response. “They were saying, ‘why are you being such a snob?’” she laughs. On seeing Ardern’s touching message, she was amazed.

There followed a deluge of “letters and gifts” sent to the hospital, and she read Max’s offer with a laugh, dismissing the idea, but when she mentioned it to her colleagues, they told her, “You should do it!” She found herself agreeing to a sitting at Denison-Pender’s south London studio. It took six or seven hours for the portrait of McGee in her blue uniform to be painted – the artist uses the “alla prima” technique, adding wet-on-wet paint “at first look” with the sitter present – and McGee insists it was a fun experience. He gave her a print of the finished work, which, she says, “I sent to my mum and dad for Christmas. They were chuffed.”

It’s a chilly autumn morning when I cycle over to the artist’s studio myself, to be greeted by the tall, deep-voiced Denison-Pender, whose exhibition Perseverance opens today at Richard Green in Mayfair. It’s named after a family legend about the dogged entrepreneurial spirit of Max’s 19th century forebear Sir John Pender, the founder of the telecoms giant Cable & Wireless, whose determined efforts to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable had to overcome a series of setbacks.

“I come from a family of mavericks,” he tells me. His father’s own entrepreneurial instincts have taken him to Chile, where Max was born, and later, as Max was growing up, to Barcelona to set up aviation conferences. His mother, too, he says, “does her own thing”, including restoration projects. It’s perhaps no surprise then that Denison-Pender decided to strike out at a young age, spurred on by spending time as a boy in the studios of Fernando Gaya and Xavi Miró, a descendant of the famous Catalan artist Joan Miró.

“Fernando was quite commercially successful,” he recalls, “but one day he told me, ‘I have to sell my studio and take a job driving trucks to feed my family.’ It really got to me. I was 13 and I wanted to be a painter.” He decided that leaving school and studying at the London Atelier of Representational Arts might give him a head start, though unsurprisingly his parents didn’t agree. “My brother Charlie was the only one who thought it was a good idea, but he was 14 at the time,” he laughs. “It’s quite intense when everyone else thinks you’re being a complete idiot. But worst-case scenario: I have to go and sleep on my mum’s sofa when I’m 30. Embarrassing. I don’t care. I’m willing to take the risk.”

After leaving LARA (now sadly closed thanks to the pandemic), Denison-Pender began hustling to make a living from his art, going around West End pubs asking if he could offer to sketch the customers for a tenner. “I made £90 in three hours every night in cash,” he says. One satisfied customer asked him if he would paint his favourite pub, [The Scarsdale Tavern] in Kensington – “My first proper commission,” he notes, adding that as he worked, he noticed pop star James Blunt and TV presenter Piers Morgan walk in for a pint. The job gave him the idea for an exhibition of similar works, and his show “The Heart of London” featured lush, colour-rich paintings of city streets and interiors that call to mind French Impressionists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pisarro.

He began taking portrait commissions, inspired partly by the success of another LARA alumnus, Jamie Coreth (who won the Visitor’s Choice prize at last year’s BP Portrait Award). His own style continues to develop, “I’m getting more and more loose in my strokes.” But he also took a detour into the latest art fad – “NFTs”, electronic “tokens” that can’t be copied, which are used to authenticate the ownership of digital works.

Denison-Pender’s NFT project happened almost by chance on a trip “to paint cakes for an Icelandic restaurant”. The Fagradalsfjall volcano had just erupted, and the artist came up with an idea to paint a self-portrait beside the boiling cone, then have a drone fly the painting to certain destruction in the burning lava, filming the performance as a digital work. He hoped it might catch the attention of Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who intends to take a crew of eight artists with him on a 2023 space flight. Making the work though was quite a task.

All but one of Iceland’s professional drone fliers turned down the proposal, then after lugging an easel up the slopes of the volcano “for miles through all the gas, the drone couldn’t lift the canvas, [because] of this tiny little bit of wind”. The next day, though, they tried again, and it worked perfectly, as YouTube can attest. It was a financial success, too, with the NFT selling for £125,000. Yet Denison-Pender says, “I don’t think I’m going to do another NFT for a long time. It takes away from the other ideas I have.”

These include the portraits of athletes in competition that he had hoped to paint as one of the two official artists of the GB Olympics team in 2020, a role that was derailed by Covid protocols when the Games took place in Tokyo earlier this year. He has made up for it with the large painting of Anthony Joshua that will appear in Perseverance, an exhibition which showcases his instinctive talent as a painter, especially his unselfconscious love of colour.

On the wall is a large whiteboard with Denison-Pender’s elaborate five-year plan towards an exhibition which he intends to feature works created in extreme locations around the world. If the chance came to go to space, he’d jump at that, too, of course. As for Jenny McGee, the unexpected day in the studio came as something of a relief from the trauma of intensive care. “January, February of this year is what really took a toll on me,” she tells me. “The second wave was so much worse than the first.” Next year, at last, she is being allowed to fly back home to New Zealand to see her family.

And the portraits of her and Luís? After a request from No 10, they went on display outside Boris’s office for six months, after which they were auctioned off and raised more than £3,500 for charity. A document of our time.

Max Denison-Pender: Persevere is at Richard Green, W1 from Dec 2 until Dec 10