Millie Knight by Dene Leigh

Millie Knight was nominated to sit for this portrait due to her successes in sport and for being ‘an outstanding role mode for young people locally and around the country’. Millia has won Gold, Silver and Bronze medals in various competitions including the Paralympic Winter Games and other World championships.

Artist Dene Leigh specialises in oil painting using layered imagery to uniquely capture the personality, life and achievements of his portrait sitters. The collage-like composition of this painting has an interesting relationship with how the sitter’s lived experience as Millie explains:

“Obviously because I’ve only got peripheral sight, I don’t have the central area of vision… my brain for some reason fills in the blank and kind of patches everything together and I won’t realise that I really can’t see centrally.” – Millie Knight