If someone had told me the day before the bombing that this would happen to me, I absolutely know that I would have said, ‘There is no way I will be able to do that. I will not be able to function as a double amputee, I won't be able to balance, you know, what does that mean?’ And I'm so impressed – and I’ll say it collectively because I believe it collectively, that it's part of who we are as human beings – I’m so impressed with our ability to adapt, and that our sense of – my sense of – life was so strong that it superseded everything else. So if I've got a chance to have a life, where I can learn how to walk and balance on prosthetic legs, then fantastic, I'm gonna grab at that.
What I found extraordinary about seeing the portrait was I've never been captured like that before. I'm always mentally busy, and there's always something going on and there was this capturing, that I felt that Tony had actually just gone into my soul. And I've never seen that before. Because I look calm. I think there's a serenity about the picture that's extraordinary. And for me, I don't see the poles where the legs used to be, I don't see the prosthetics first. I get a sense of serenity first. And then I hone in on the detail. And I think that is what makes the portrait actually quite exceptional, that I don't see what's different. I get an experience of feeling from it first.
