ARTIST Laura Rich from Mere will be showcasing her work in the UK’s largest floating art collection on the P&O cruise ship – the Britannia – in March 2015.

Rich has produced 64 large, contemporary oil landscape paintings for the cabin suites, which will form part of the 8,000-strong collection featuring a diverse range of styles and disciplines.

Rich, who takes her inspiration from the Wiltshire downland and Dorset coastline, said: “I am creating images with texture and emotion and I would like the viewer to see something different each time they look at the painting.

“I’m working to create lots of layers of narrative and hope this process provokes a memory or stirs an emotion in the onlooker.”

She added: “Commissions I have worked on before have not been to this scale.

“They have mainly been portrait commissions or one-off paintings. Now I also have interest in my work from galleries across England.”

The multi-million pound art collection represents have been chosen to complement and enhance the ship’s designs to give the feel of a luxury hotel.

Art consultant Tom Tempest-Radford, who has compiled the collection in conjunction with Britannia’s designers, Richmond International, has focused on a variety of textures, surfaces and fine detail to complement Britannia’s interiors and create sophisticated, yet comfortable, surroundings.

He said: “Britannia is going to be very different to other P&O Cruises ships and I feel it could set a whole new standard.

“The richness of artistic materials is amazing and there is a huge variety of really crafted materials that create an incredible depth of flavour.”