Nancy Tichborne


Nancy Tichborne is a New Zealand watercolour artist. She specialises in paintings of flowers; her work has appeared on calendars, diaries, cards and postage stamps in New Zealand.

Biography

Tichborne was born in 1942 to Peggy and Harvey Keedwell, and grew up in Hāwera, in the North Island of New Zealand. She is the second of three daughters. In the early 1950s the family moved to Dunedin and Tichborne attended Otago Girls' High School. On finishing high school, she went to London on a scholarship and studied art at St Martin's School of Art. She then went on to work in Hong Kong as a fashion illustrator for the South China Morning Post and a fashion designer for an American fashion house.
In 1970 Tichborne returned to New Zealand and settled in Rotorua. She worked part-time as an art teacher and collaborated with her sisters Helen Leach and Mary Browne on a series of cookbooks, providing the watercolour artwork for them. In the mid-1980s Tichborne and her husband Bryan founded the New Zealand Calendar Company, and started producing calendars with a New Zealand focus. Their first calendar featured fishing flies, and later titles featured flowers and cats.
In 1997 Tichborne designed a series of stamps and a first day cover for New Zealand Post depicting vineyards of New Zealand. In the 1990s Tichborne also released a series of DVDs on watercolour technique.

Recognition

In 2007, Tichborne was appointed patron of Watercolour New Zealand.

Personal life

Tichborne met Bryan Tichborne in England while she was studying there and the couple married in Hong Kong in 1965. They have three sons.

Publications