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ABOUT US
We are Rich and Becky Walsh, a brother and sister team. We spent our childhoods painting and drawing. Despite this love of art we both decided to pursue careers outside of art and design, but have been slowly drawn back in ever since.
Rich did Geography as a first degree. His mates said you just make posters and colour maps in. How he has proved them wrong! He had been working as a caricaturist (www.mycaricature.co.uk) for three years before setting up Firewater Gallery.
Rebecca was a lawyer by day, and a guerilla portrait artiste by night.
We always wanted to set up a business together, and when Rebecca decided to take a break from her legal career, we thought it was the perfect time to make it happen. Firewater Gallery was born.
We love exploring new and exciting places. Wherever we go, we always take a sketchbook with us. That you can only carry a few pens and pencils, perhaps a nice chisel-tipped marker, a Pentel brushpen, a soluble graphite pencil, has helped shape the style of our artwork. And living in Bristol, with its major graffiti and urban art scene, has probably helped a wee bit too. Back in the studio, we take our sketches and refine them into finished pieces.
So how about the maps? Well our Dad’s first job was in the Ordnance Survey. The Ordnance Survey was created in the UK in the 18th century so people knew what their guns were aiming at (at this time the maps were excitingly vague). Most likely we owe our fascination with maps to him.
We started thinking how as well as having landscapes on our walls it would be pretty cool to have a map mosaic of the places we love. So we set out to create beautiful and contemporary art maps that depict the places which shaped our lives. We created a couple as gifts, and they went down a storm. We decided there might be a wider audience for them.
This is us sharing those prints and maps with you. We hope you like them.
Rich and Becky
FACTS YOU DIDN'T NEED TO KNOW ABOUT RICH AND BECKY
He looks unbelievably bad in all hats.
As a child she appeared on the Chuckle Brothers gameshow. She lost.