McKay Williamson creates bespoke, deeply personal artworks from clients’ most cherished memories and moments.

Founded by American artist Richard Williamson in 2002, creative agency McKay Williamson has redefined the way people commission and collect art by offering a bespoke experience where a client’s cherished memories can be turned into artworks redolent with personal meaning and significance. 

With expert creatives and curators in fine art, design, photography and film, McKay Williamson’s fully integrated consultancy service is tailored to each client’s needs, from sourcing artists to commission artworks, curating media and offering professional insight into interior design.

With a belief that art can be demonstrative as well as decorative, this creative agency offers an innovative, contemporary approach to preserving and displaying memories and experiences, bringing a deeply personal narrative to the art in our homes. 

Today, the growing demand for personalisation in products and services has grown, and with the coronavirus lockdown sharpening a collective focus on our domestic environment, McKay Williamsons’ innovative creative services bring a deeply personal experience to commissioning and collecting art. 

McKay Williamson provides an opportunity for the consumer to collaborate with the artist and get an insight into their creative process. The creative agency works with reputable artists such as BP Portrait Award winners Paul Wright, Craig Whylie and Mary Jane Ansell, celebrated photographer Mark Seliger,  Italy’s official representative at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Marco Grassi, Art Basel exhibitor Marco Battaglini and former President of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, Peter Wileman. 

A recent commission to celebrate a 40th birthday took inspiration from moments of deep personal significance - the Italian plaza in which he proposed, the Vespa she had arrived on, a latin translation of their wedding vows - which were brought together to create a mosaic work with multiple-layers of meaning.

To mark an anniversary of a frequent-flying couple, a world map was populated with personal photographs and love letters to each other, capturing their life and travels together.

Commissioned portraits are created in all different forms of media, depending on the artists best practise and include works from Pam Glew who makes commissioned portraits using bleach on denim and Fernanda Cataldo who works with low-res images to create stunning pastel shades of yellow, pink and blue that capture the subject's gaze. 

McKay Williamson employs a team of professional filmmakers to create films as an additional way to tell the clients’ stories, from insightful interviews with children, to thoughtful films for life’s milestones, including A Friends’ Toast and The World According to Kids. A recent commission to celebrate an 18th birthday saw interviews with both the birthday boy and his family throughout his childhood come together to make The World According to Ben - a playful and humorous account of his life and perspectives. 

Camera phones have meant that capturing a moment is now easier than ever, but as such it’s easy to accumulate thousands of images and videos and this is where McKay Williamson steps in. Their Keepsaker service helps to cut down, organise and curate the clients media in slide shows, framed prints and gallery walls, whilst working to highlight and acknowledge a different memory and meaningful story.

As both an artist and gallerist, Richard Williamson has taken his fascination with personal stories and built a unique offering for the art world for both consumers and artists. McKay Williamson not only produces art through personal memory, but it also creates works that have symbolic reference to their clients, providing contemporary artists with commissions that support their best practice. The creative agency has developed a new way to create fine art from memory and its mission is to continue to make a product that was once an artistic and social tradition available to all. 

Richard Williamson says: “McKay Williamson redefines personal media, proving that it can be both meaningful and clever, both soulful and playful, and it can and should be a work of art. Our clients love to have a piece of art that holds both wonderful memories without losing the sophistication and beauty of the art. Bespoke work at this level is hard to come by.”

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