LAURENCE LLEWELYN-BOWEN ART
THE ART
Alongside a stratospheric media career LLB assiduously built a home design brand using his very particular eye for colour, pattern and his exquisite abilities as a draughtsman to create product that remains Iconic. The influences are varied and multilayered. His youthful enthusiasm for Pre Raphaelitism still resonates with elegant references to pre raphaelite adjacent designers like William Morris Sidney Mawson and AWN Pugin.
There’s also plenty of the contemporary in an LLB product; Fashion and Cineamatography cast particularly extravagant aesthetic shadows in his applied art oeuvre.
DANDY IN THE PLEASURE GARDEN 2026
Arranged in profile in front of highly stylised horticultural backgrounds -
a series of exotic birds are adorned with extravagant jewelry and magnificent turbans.
VENETIAN FULL MOON 2024/2025
Using 18th Century imagined Venicescapes (known as Capriccios) as a starting point, deserted Venetian spaces are suffused with a Dali-Esq dreamworld. LLB's technical mastery literally shines through the incandescent moons and ultramarine skies which are directly inspired by 14th Century paint glaze techniques.
BAROQUE GARDENS 2024
Exotic opulent Parklands brimming to bursting point with lush voluptuous foliage, find themselves overtaken by glamorous apex predators and jewel coloured birdlife. Ornate stage set inspired architectural follies evoke the operatic decorative wall painting typical of 17th Century palaces.
THE TEMPEST IN FOUR ACTS 2026
LLB has long been fascinated by Shakespeare's final - and most unruly - play. Across four pieces, The Tempest's acts are contained within fantastical theatrical facades inspired by Victorian toy theatres. The surreal imagery draws on the visionary cinema of filmmakers Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, the decedent line-work of 20th Century illustrator and Beardsley acolyte. Harry Clarke, and the heightened styalisation of contemporary manga.
COTSWOLD FANTASIA 2025
A hymn in paint to LLB'S high summer Cotswold garden. A place of dark Viridian shadows and hot-hued heavy-petalled blooms. These original paintings were taken directly onto Fabric and wallpaper designs to create some of Brand LLBs best selling collections.
DRAWN TO ADORN 2026
An exhibition of large-scale works on paper, in which LLB explores illustrative art’s voluptuous obsession with decorative exoticism. Drawing on a lifelong admiration for Aubrey Beardsley, the ornate stage-scenery designs of 17th century baroque masters—particularly the Bibiena Brothers—18th century botanical engravings, and 20th century surrealism, each piece unfolds as a richly imaginative and ornamental story brimming with fairy-tale charm… and, of course, a dash of LLB’s signature wit.
HATHUND 2026
With a nod to prewar advertising, LLBs HatHunds seem to be taking their job as hat models super seriously. Boksky views of well behaved British landscapes heighten a sense of order which in turn makes the images that much more wittily surreal.
Commissions with specific pet portraits are undertaken.
MIDSUMMER 2026
The Victorian masters of Fairy Painting were an early and very powerful influence on LLB’s youthful aesthetic. The shades of Noel Paton, William Etty and the schizophrenic father-murderer Richard Dadd have all been summoned in these fascinating, intricate, erotic pictures of a moonlit fairysphere. With Shakespeare as a starting point, there’s a strong flavour of ancient Athens in the Hellenic flora and tumbling hedgerows.
TUSCAN FANSASIA 2026
These powerful twilight-lit Tuscan vistas are all directly inspired by off-the-shelf AI imagery. Reclaiming for Fine Art what Artificial Intelligence unintelligently creates demonstrates LLB’s mastery of light, colour and tone, as well as a prodigious ability to summon up the experience of Northern Italy’s mysterious Golden Hour.
AVIANA 2026
Exotic birds in tumbling Romantic landscapes became the go-to subject matter for glamorous Rococo interiors. They allowed 18th-century masters, and now LLB, to lose themselves in the rich jewel colours of rare feathers set against evening-lit foliage and crisp cerulean skies.
VUDATA 2019/2020
LLB’s ability to conjure forth the fluffy foliage and sweeping chiaroscuro vistas of mid-18th-century fantastical landscapes is unmatched. Clever, witty and intensely glamorous, LLB’s vedute—or fantasy views—spring up across an array of Brand LLB home furnishings.
