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<\/p>\nWith a cup of tea in hand, Victoria Rees leads the way down a garden path from her hillside home, through the tumbling branches of an old apple orchard to a small, wooden artist\u2019s studio where floor-to-ceiling windows flood the room with light and offer sweeping views across a green valley.<\/p>\n
Closely following her is Dave Newman, a local farmer, balancing a yellow teapot, mug and muffin on a tray, as well as a story he has written for her on the back of an envelope.<\/p>\n
It is a ritual the unlikely pair have performed almost every Tuesday afternoon for the past 13 years, as Newman sits as a model for Rees to help her hone her speed and skill with her oil paints.<\/p>\n
For the next 50 minutes they talk, laugh and share stories while Rees completes a small one-off portrait of Newman to add to the hundreds of others of him in her collection.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a collaboration more than anything else,\u201d Newman, 70, says, as The Times joins them in the studio near Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t feel I sit for her as a model. We collaborate to produce a small portrait. And we talk. It\u2019s like a counselling session for both of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor me there\u2019s a friendship,\u201d Rees, also 70, interjects, as she adds confident brushstrokes to a 11in by 9in canvas. \u201cI\u2019ve come to understand Dave\u2019s life as a farmer and what that means. And actually there are lots of similarities, in that as a painter you are alone a lot in your studio. And as a small farmer, Dave ran that farm by himself, he was alone a lot working. So there was a lot to exchange and understand about each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There are hundreds of portraits of Newman in Rees\u2019s studio<\/p>\n
ADRIAN SHERRATT FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n
Newman was a second-generation farmer in the steep Cotswolds valley and had been running his 130-acre farm alone since 1988. For the last ten years before he retired in 2022, he was being paid to turn it into a wildlife haven, looking after meadows where the vulnerable chalkhill blue butterfly flourishes on the unimproved grassland.<\/p>\n
\u2022 British butterfly \u2018emergency\u2019: count finds lowest numbers in 14 years<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Although Rees lived in a neighbouring house for several decades, their friendship didn\u2019t begin until February 2012 when she approached Newman in one of his fields as she enjoyed a walk.<\/p>\n She had recently lost a commission because she wasn\u2019t able to work quickly enough for her subject\u2019s liking, and needed a regular sitter to help quicken her craft. <\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t have a clue what I was signing up for,\u201d Newman says. \u201cI just thought I\u2019m going to go down and just sit for her maybe just once and just see what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n ADRIAN SHERRATT FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n Since then Newman has only missed the occasional Tuesday owing to the demands of a harvest or a holiday. He says it has allowed him to broaden his horizons. <\/p>\n \u201cIn the past, I felt guilty just by going to a garden centre for an hour because I thought I should be working,\u201d he says. \u201cSo when we established this routine, it gave me something else to think about.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re a farmer, you\u2019ve got tunnel vision of what your life should be. You don\u2019t realise there are other little streams going outside. So this was a little stream that took me away from the tunnel vision of farming. It\u2019s done me the world of good.\u201d<\/p>\n Slipping into their easy friendship, Rees interrupts to ask Newman if he initially found it \u201ca shock coming here and being social\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, I thought it was good training,\u201d he says. \u201cYou could be on the farm all day long and not talk to anybody and forget how to talk. But at least coming here gave me a chance to speak to someone different as well, not just to your farming friends, because they tend to talk about farms and what bad things they\u2019re going through.<\/p>\n \u201cSo it\u2019s just nice to talk to someone in a completely different plane, and be able to use different words than you would do with farming. So I find it very helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n ADRIAN SHERRATT FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n ADRIAN SHERRATT FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n During the Covid-19 pandemic<\/a>, Newman took inspiration from a Reader\u2019s Digest competition to write a story in 100 words. Drawing on his love of Spike Milligan<\/a>, he began writing a short story every fortnight to read to Rees during their Tuesday sessions.<\/p>\n \u201cI really look forward to hearing them,\u201d Rees says. \u201cDay in, day out, I come down to my studio and have done for years, and it\u2019s a great studio and I\u2019m very lucky, but suddenly I\u2019ve got this world \u2014 well it\u2019s not suddenly because it\u2019s been 13 years of this craziness \u2014 but I\u2019ve got this wonderful thing and now our lives are sort of entwined.\u201d<\/p>\n What started out as a pragmatic way of getting quicker as a painter had developed into \u201can answer in its own right\u201d, Rees says.<\/p>\n \u201cThe paintings at the end are as important as the story and what we get together and what we give to each other as friends, everything, it\u2019s all one,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n ADRIAN SHERRATT FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n ADRIAN SHERRATT FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n She says her painting style is now less \u201cprocess-led\u201d and she isn\u2019t afraid to fail. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter, you know, because what this is giving us is enough for it to be a successful day,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n \u201cThe portraits started out much more formal and then gradually as time went on and I began to understand Dave\u2019s life and wanted to portray him in a different way. I brought in the hands and more of his figure because his hands are such a major part of his life.<\/p>\n \u201cGradually the forms around Dave have become simplified and abstracted down so that hopefully the paintings start to increase in intensity around the head and around the hands.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Artist](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/0f5c806d-e7b6-4550-a717-b21d10ff38ad.jpg\")
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