"I find that I have always been drawn towards powerful, intelligent and beautiful women without ever really understanding why, though I suppose it has everything to do with my upbringing and background. I have nothing but the greatest admiration for my mother, who survived the trauma of losing everything, including my father, who she was besotted with. She once told me that she married him because he looked like Clark Gable with the manners and bearing of an aristocrat, which she often pretended to be herself ".

In her youth, Lily Fitzpatrick was a very striking redhead with a wildly adventurous streak, and who was daft enough to join the Blueshirts because they threw the best parties in Dublin and when she found out what a bunch of anti-semetic, right wing Catholic Fundamentalists they were, left and joined the local Zionist society and had a much more interesting time and a lot more fun.

"Life", says the artist,"was never dull when my mother was around. Even as a much older woman she never lost her childishly mischievous sense of fun or her perpetually argumentative nature. For a woman, she was born out of her time and suffered as a result of her sense of independence and notions of equality, which were frowned on in the Ireland of her day. As a single mother she was victimised by self righteous clergy and one or two spiteful neighbours but on the whole people seemed drawn by her charismatic personality, her kindness and her courage in the face of such adversity. Mind you, she made sure that she had a lot of fun along the way and she was never short of a boyfriend..or two..or three !."

For most of her life she worked as a fashion buyer, a rather glamorous occupation in post-war Dublin, and as a result her social circle included the gifted and the glamorous, the straight and the not so straight. "I grew up in a world full of prejudice, homophobia and racism, but thanks to my mother I inherited none of them, and was taught to be tolerant of everybody regardless of race, creed or color. It is a quality I hope I have passed on to my own children".