But worst-case scenario: I have to go and sleep on my mum’s sofa when I’m 30. “It’s quite intense when everyone else thinks you’re being a complete idiot. “My brother Charlie was the only one who thought it was a good idea, but he was 14 at the time,” he laughs.
I was 13 and I wanted to be a painter.” He decided that leaving school and studying at the London Atelier of Representational Arts might give him a head start, though unsurprisingly his parents didn’t agree. “Fernando was quite commercially successful,” he recalls, “but one day he told me, ‘I have to sell my studio and take a job driving trucks to feed my family.’ It really got to me. It’s perhaps no surprise then that Denison-Pender decided to strike out at a young age, spurred on by spending time as a boy in the studios of Fernando Gaya and Xavi Miró, a descendant of the famous Catalan artist Joan Miró. His mother, too, he says, “does her own thing”, including restoration projects.
His father’s own entrepreneurial instincts have taken him to Chile, where Max was born, and later, as Max was growing up, to Barcelona to set up aviation conferences. “I come from a family of mavericks,” he tells me.
It’s named after a family legend about the dogged entrepreneurial spirit of Max’s 19th century forebear Sir John Pender, the founder of the telecoms giant Cable & Wireless, whose determined efforts to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable had to overcome a series of setbacks. It’s a chilly autumn morning when I cycle over to the artist’s studio myself, to be greeted by the tall, deep-voiced Denison-Pender, whose exhibition Perseverance opens today at Richard Green in Mayfair. He gave her a print of the finished work, which, she says, “I sent to my mum and dad for Christmas. It took six or seven hours for the portrait of McGee in her blue uniform to be painted – the artist uses the “alla prima” technique, adding wet-on-wet paint “at first look” with the sitter present – and McGee insists it was a fun experience.
There followed a deluge of “letters and gifts” sent to the hospital, and she read Max’s offer with a laugh, dismissing the idea, but when she mentioned it to her colleagues, they told her, “You should do it!” She found herself agreeing to a sitting at Denison-Pender’s south London studio. On seeing Ardern’s touching message, she was amazed. “They were saying, ‘why are you being such a snob?’” she laughs. She decided to turn off her phone but woke next morning to find her friends asking her why she hadn’t responded to New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who had told television viewers back home that she had reached out to her fellow Kiwi but hadn’t had a response. Journalists had begun turning up at her home, and “my boyfriend was ringing saying, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ I actually got quite panicky and it was all a bit scary.” “I had to go to work that night,” she tells me by phone from the Caribbean, where she has been working in recent months. Jenny McGee, from Invercargill on the South Island, says it was a “complete shock – I wasn’t given any warning” when her name was mentioned in dispatches to the nation.
Both had taken care of the Prime Minister after he was admitted to intensive care at St Thomas’s Hospital, in London, and both later accepted a hand-written, hand-delivered invitation from Denison-Pender to sit for a portrait to raise money for the NHS. It was back in April 2020, when Boris Johnson, after surviving a worryingly close call with Covid-19, personally thanked two nurses, “Jenny from New Zealand” and “Luís from Portugal”, who “stood by my bedside for 48 hours, when things could have gone either way”. But it was an assignment relating to the occupant of that famous address which really hit the headlines last year. The 23-year-old, who left school at 16 to pursue his dream of being a painter, has painted next to an erupting volcano, with dangerous gas alarms going off beside him amid the blur of punches in a boxing gym with then world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua and on the steps of No 10 Downing Street. For a young artist, Max Denison-Pender is certainly adept at getting himself noticed.