Neil Davies is a regular at the Tipsy Toad family pub in El Galan. He is also a very talented artist, one that is very confident of his own artistic ability, and although favouring watercolours, he particularly likes to experiment, be it with mediums, with textures and with art forms, where the outcome, he says, is knowledge, and where failure is just as valuable as success.
His ambition was always to be an artist but with a successful career in construction, leaving secure employment was always going to be a concern, however, on reaching his 45th birthday in 1993 the leap was finally made and, together with his wife Sue, the pair left their comfortable lifestyle in Morecambe and headed for the small fishing and holiday village of Burgau on the Algarve, where he then spent month after month building up his portfolio, prior to opening a studio in the town centre.
Fast forward to the present and almost 30 years later, after dozens of prestigious commissions across the world, the couple settled in El Galan and, almost immediately their relationship with their local pub began.
“I soon became a regular at the Tipsy Toad where I got to know the proprietors Andy and Lisa, and after one particular discussion during the early winter of 2021 we were throwing ideas around as to how we could cover a blank wall in the bar. The seed for the Sporting Mural was sewn,” Neil said, “a feature of sporting crests and badges in the form of a large mural.”
Of course, Neil was to be the artist. He would create the mural while the local clientele and holidaymakers would be encouraged to sponsor their favourite sports club crest.
“We suggested a minimum contribution and the requests and donations flooded in. Most of the crests were of football clubs but there were also rugby and cricket crests, and at least one Gaelic Football badge.”
Neil continued, “The aim was to raise much needed funds to help the local children’s home in Orihuela to purchase essential clothing for their children. Some locals sponsored more than one club, one client even sponsored three club crests and although the minimum amount for each badge was twenty euros some gave considerably more.
In no time at all we had raised in excess of £1,500 for the children which was all passed on to the orphanage.”
Eventually, of course, Neil and The Tipsy Toad ran out of wall space, so they had to start saying no to further potential sponsors, “which was unfortunate, but inevitable,” he said.
Neil personally sponsored two club badges the first of which was for his local football club back in the UK, Morecambe FC, where he was born and brought up.
The second was for a dear friend who used to play as a semi-professional footballer for a club that no longer plays under the same name. It was called Netherfield and it now plays under the name of Kendal Town.
Neil added that, “Finding out what the old Netherfield badge looked like took some digging around. It would appear that K Shoes started the club at the end of the First World War and because the K Shoe company had their factory in Kendal, Cumbria, their stylised letter K featured in the centre of the club badge. As it transpired, way down the line, Netherfield was the first football club to inadvertently feature a sponsor’s logo on its football kit. The thin end of the wedge so to speak.”
The first club crest to be painted onto the wall was Arsenal’s, it looked very lonely at the time but not for very long. Tongue in cheek, Neil said that the most difficult crest to paint was the Yorkshire Cricket Club crest. That might, of course, have something to do with the fact that he is a Lancashire lad!
In total the whole wall of murals took Neil in excess of one hundred and fifty working hours but every hour spent, he said, was well worth it. Some of the crests were quite straight forward and some stretched him somewhat. On average each one took between three and four working hours.
And as for his other commissions, perhaps not quite as prestigious as the Tipsy Toad mural; the Millennium Dome, the Dubai Metro and the Vasco de Gama Bridge might whet your appetite, and we will no doubt come back to them all in a future article, but the one commission that really did give him a great amount of pleasure was his appointment as the official FA Artist in 2000, to cover the very last FA Cup Final at the ‘old’ Wembley stadium. And if you can’t remember (Villa fans might want to stop reading at this point) the outcome, Chelsea beat Aston Villa by 1-0 with a goal scored by Roberto Di Matteo.
