A cricket match changed Sherree Valentine-Daines’s life. She was pitch-side, brush in hand, capturing the bowling and batting, when someone extended the invitation that would fire up her career: ‘Do you want to paint at The Oval tomorrow?’
‘I didn’t even know where that was,’ she laughs. She did find it — and painted ‘a lovely big scene’ of England playing against the West Indies. ‘Then the BBC thought: “Oh, this is good television.” I was invited onto the cricket highlights and the producers said: “Next year, would you paint the Ashes and we’ll film the whole series?”’
It was a triumph for the girl who had left school at 15 ‘because the only thing I was good at was netball’. Although she did then go to art school for four years, forging her name as an artist had initially appeared daunting. ‘It’s like falling off a cliff, because there’s no job out there. I had my one-man show in a local school and sold everything. I thought, “Oh, this is great” — then started approaching galleries and [saw that] they only want you when you have success. I realised I had to make my own success.’ The BBC’s Ashes commission gave her the break she needed, although, she admits, she was rather out of her depth when it came to her cricket knowledge: ‘Famously, [in] one picture that went into the Olympic Games exhibition, I had 13 players and four umpires, because I thought it was a nice composition.’
A sketch of various Mustangs setting off down the pit straight at Goodwood Motor Circuit.
(Image credit: Goodwood/Sherree Valentine-Daines)
‘At art school, someone invited me to Henley. It was a Thursday and I thought: “Don’t people work on a Thursday?”’
As it turns out, that sporting blunder didn’t matter. The Ashes paintings led first to a solo exhibition at the Barbican — ‘I don’t know how, as this young girl with no contact at all, I managed to do that’ — then a commission to paint a rugby match. The much faster nature of the game made it a trickier proposition than cricket — where, she chuckles, the change ‘from a left- to a right-handed batsman was probably the most excitement’.
To pile on the pressure, when she arrived at The Stoop, the Harlequins’ stadium in Twickenham, west London, her patrons told her the finished picture would be auctioned off for charity at the end of the match. ‘I was absolutely flabbergasted. Anyway, I quickly painted green all over and a bit of blue at the top, then I put a couple of posts. And I thought, well, the Harlequins wear four colours, so I squiggled all these lumps of colours, the arms and legs. I think the other team was red, so I did lots of red, then a ball in the middle and somehow it looked like a rugby match.’
What she endearingly calls squiggles and lumps are in fact the building blocks of her neo-Impressionist style: back in those early days, she realised that, ‘because people move so fast, you end up painting an impression of someone. [My choice of style was] probably not by design, but just happened.’ Soon, this accidental Impressionist was painting races, carriage rides and regattas up and down the country, capturing all the action and glamour of the Season, for which she had long had a fascination.
‘I had a great big painting, it was really windy and it blew over, hit me on my neck, fell over and hit me on my nose — it was quite embarrassing’
‘Growing up, I’d never been on holiday, never been anywhere: I had a very ordinary, working-class upbringing,’ she recalls. ‘At art school, someone invited me to Henley. It was a Thursday and I thought: “Don’t people work on a Thursday?” They had boaters on, they had the old school jackets and trousers that were too short and pink socks, drinking Champagne and eating lobster. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’ A later brush with Royal Ascot persuaded her that she wanted a way into that life: ‘Painting,’ she says, ‘has been my ticket into this other world.’
Among the many doors her art opened was Glorious Goodwood, which the 10th Duke of Richmond asked her to depict some 30 years ago — and, now, she has returned to the West Sussex estate as artist-in-residence. Earlier this year, she sent the 11th Duke a selection of drawings she had made when she had first worked at Goodwood — beautifully attired people arriving in their Rolls-Royces or charabancs — and he invited her to record a year at the estate in pictures. She has since been going, sketchbook in hand, to every event — Goodwoof, cricket, racing and her personal favourite, Revival — portraying life as it unfolds.
She’s finding it ‘great fun’, despite the hurdles the great British weather sometimes flings her way: once, she recalls: ‘I had a great big painting, it was really windy and it blew over, hit me on my neck, fell over and hit me on my nose — it was quite embarrassing.’ People, she reports, love seeing an artist at work and recognising themselves on canvas — although once, as she had began a new scene, she met a critic who was as ruthless as he was small: ‘What happens when I start a painting [is that] it looks like an abstract rubbish and I had a kid come up to me and say: “My brother’s only two and he can paint better than you!”’
The assembly area at Goodwood Revival 2025.
(Image credit: Goodwood/Sherree Valentine Daines)
‘Oh, you can paint. We thought you were the tax inspector, painting as a ruse’
Neither incident, however, compares with the time she took her brushes to the vegetable market at Croydon, south London: ‘I painted there for a week and it rained just about every day. I took an umbrella and did this amazing street scene, where the vegetables, in all the bright colours, were reflected in the wet pavement.’ Water gushed past her feet as she worked, but what really threw her was the fact that not a single trader said a word to her for the entire time — until the very last day: ‘One of them came up and said: “Oh, you can paint. We thought you were the tax inspector, painting as a ruse.” Then they offered me free veg and a cup of tea.’
Suspicious traders apart, food, she finds, is very much on the menu when she paints outdoors, perhaps because of the starving-artist trope. Once, when she was stationed between a house and a bakery, working away, both the baker and the homeowner brought her food halfway through the morning, at lunchtime and mid afternoon, and stood there expectantly — ‘so I ate all this food. Then, at the end of the day, the man in the house said: “I’ve got this beautiful cupboard.” Obviously, he thought I had no furniture — and he gave me a cupboard as well’.
She pauses, then laughs: ‘I wouldn’t mind some Champagne. Perhaps, after I’m done at Goodwood, I’ll paint outside Bollinger.’
