Great grandmother to launch memoir about her life and art on the solstice

Dancing on the Moon is the story of how Christian Wharton found her vocation, painting moving water in watercolour, propelled along by a Welsh nanny, three artists and a Californian drop-out psychologist.

The great-grandmother had her home a few miles north of Berwick built according to Sthapatya Veda, ancient Indian architecture.

As a student at St Andrews in the 1950s, she befriended Patrick Procktor – an artist whose meteoric rise to fame matched that of his great friend, David Hockney.

Struggling to survive and support her two daughters, Christian took a variety of jobs from tutor to an Arab princess to sub-postmistress in a small Welsh village.

At a low ebb in her early 30s, she took up Transcendental Meditation and found that it turned her life around, slowly and steadily.

It was during her 22-year spell in a meditation community in Skelmersdale, founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (guru to the Beatles), that her paintings developed to the stage where they fetched high prices.

She has had 12 London exhibitions and her work is in private collections, hospitals and company boardrooms. Her work has been bought by leading figures in the world of business, politics, law and medicine.

Her book Painting Water in Watercolour was published in 2003 and a novel Tomato in a Black Hole, based on her experiences of the London art scene, was published in 2020.

For more information and to contact her, go to www.christianwharton.com