Natasha Archdale creates nude portraits from old Financial Times

Vanity is not yet dead in the City. Financiers have been commissioning nude portraits of their wives made from collages of newspaper clippings telling the stories of their own financial conquests.

Natasha Archdale, a model turned artist, tears strips from the City news pages that tell of the big deals to incorporate into paintings that cost up to £15,000 a time.

Archdale, 32, began using pink shreds of newspapers to match her own flesh tones when she was stuck in hospital for six weeks after a car crash and, as she was bored, decided to create a self-portrait.



With no paint at hand, she ripped up a copy of the Financial Times, borrowed glue from her nurse and stuck the pieces on her picture to give shading and contours. From this bedside doodling has grown a lucrative career in which she uses newsprint to turn her paintings into collages.

Archdale is finding that the City crash has brought a new form of financial schadenfreude from bankers keen to celebrate the demise of rivals. “I am getting new commissions from people who want to mark these times,” she said last week.

“One wants all the cuttings about the collapse of Lehman Brothers imposed on a picture of a naked model. I can’t possibly mention names but he is a rival banker.”

Natasha's website, with two galleries.