Pocket portraits: Essex artist paints miniature landmark pictures on old coins

Cultural currency may be a phrase beloved of marketing and advertising execs, but an artist seems to have taken it literally.

Where branding experts use it to mean the job of teaming up with music artists and social media influencers to make a product cool, Yvonne Jack has been turning currency into works of art.

The Essex based artist has painted scenes of famous British landmarks to theMona Lisa on coins.

She says it is all about showcasing the "beauty" of miniature.

Yvonne Jack was exhibiting a mixture of art pieces at a pop-up gallery in the city, which soon led to her dabbling in painting on pre-decimal coins - coins struck before the change to decimal coinage in 1971.

"The woman that ran the pop-up gallery was doing an exhibition at the Houses of Parliament to celebrate the new city of Southend-on-Sea and she said, 'I've got these old coins, can you paint something on them for this exhibition?"

"I did four coins for her and she took them and said loads of people really loved them and then it just became a bit of a challenge to see what else I could fit on this really tiny space."

So far the 48-year-old from Thundersley, has completed more than 50 paintings, including Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, as well as famous buildings including The Houses of Parliament, Tower Bridge, St Paul's Cathedral and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

She posts her work to TikTok and Instagram and draws inspiration from followers' suggestions.

She said while she has loved working on all the coins, she has a particular fondness for one of Flatford Mill in Suffolk.

"When I was a child, my mum had this painting of it on our lounge wall and when I look at it, it just takes you back there," she added.

She said the most popular comment she gets from social media followers is 'oh my God, how can you do that?'One of her highlights from the project has been showcasing four of her coins, including the Houses of Parliament one, at the Royal Miniature Society Annual Exhibition, which ran from June to July 2023 at Bankside Gallery, London.

"I'd never realised there were things like the Royal Miniature Society and just to meet these like-minded people who loved miniature was great and it spurs you on to go home and make things that are even more detailed," she said.

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