One might think that one of the biggest tourist attractions the United Kingdom can offer this autumn is the Christmas display at Harrods or the lighting of Oxford Street, but the truth is that many Beatles fans are traveling to Surrey (about 40 km from London) to attend an art exhibition that has little to do with anthems like Hey Jude or Let It Be. And it's because Tatia Starkey (41) - the granddaughter of Ringo Starr himself - is presenting her first solo show.
It's called Invert. An exhibition that can currently be visited at Kaizen Fine Art, a gallery located in Surrey. And, according to various British media, it is "astonishing." The reason? The painter not only uses acrylic to create her compositions... but also her own body, which she presses onto a canvas, in order to "stamp shapes and textures."
Tatia Starkey was born in London, in September 1985, into a family composed of Zak Starkey - Ringo's son who was, for 29 years, the drummer for The Who - and his wife Sarah Menikides. According to Tatia, her childhood was quite normal, as her parents tried to keep her away from the limelight. "I didn't grow up in a world of celebrities," she recently told Tatler. However, when she was six years old, she began to be aware of who her grandfather was, who used to fill the house with toys for her.
Later, at 14, she started accompanying her father on The Who's tours, where she ran backstage. But soon that life started to bore her, and sometimes she preferred to stay in the hotel eating chips or watching a movie rather than listening to Baba O'Riley or My Generation in front of thousands of people. Nevertheless, she says she has great memories of those crazy years.
Like when Pete Townshend threw a stool a meter from her face. "It wasn't aimed at me. But I remember thinking 'wow. These guys are insane. You don't mess with The Who," she told the aforementioned magazine, to which she also confessed that she is very close to her father, with whom she has a relationship of "mutual inspiration." However, the artist insists that being Zak's daughter or Ringo's granddaughter hasn't helped her to position herself in the world she moves in.
"Because I'm Ringo's granddaughter, I suppose there will be people who have opinions about how seemingly easy it is for me to be an artist. But it doesn't matter whose relative you are. If your music is crap or your art doesn't speak to people, you won't get very far. A famous family can give you a small foot in the door, but then it depends on whether you can walk through it or not," she states.
Before becoming a painter, Tatia - who has a 10-year-old son named Stone - was dedicated to music. According to various biographies, she played bass in a band called Belakiss and in 2013, joined a band called My Vitriol, with whom she still plays. She also performs live with OneFifteen, a new group led by Joseph Pancucci, the former bassist of Fat White Family. But in reality, she is now very focused on the visual arts.
According to Kaizen Fine Art gallery, Starkey started painting in 2023 and the origin of her interest in painting was quite peculiar. According to her own words, the Englishwoman had a five-year relationship with a musician whom she prefers not to identify, and when they broke up, she spent three years trying to deal with the experience. "I tried different types of therapy to try to shed all the layers and feel better," she recently indicated.
But nothing helped much until one day, she remembered an image she had seen 20 years earlier: a couple lying intertwined on a canvas. "And then I grabbed a bunch of paint and paper... and my body followed the impulse. My body naturally gravitated towards expression and suddenly, I was healing without forcing myself to heal. Art became liberation," she explained to Tatler in September, about the paintings she now exhibits.
According to what can be seen on the gallery's website, Tatia sells paintings for several thousand pounds sterling. In fact, she has one called Avano that sells for 9,850 pounds. That is, almost 11,600 euros. And who are her buyers? We don't know, although she has acknowledged that Ringo owns some of her works and that only some have been gifts. "He never asks how the paintings are made, if I use my body or not. But I don't tell him either. He's my grandfather after all!" she pointed out two weeks ago.