Shaping a new career as an artist!

The James Bond car fanatic and art phenomenon is now calling himself Nelsonn Nanson. It was Nelson with one n', the extra letter has crept in because he is a hip happening sort of guy. At least, David Hockney and the Tate Gallery think so.

Within a month of launching himself as an artist, the former dentist had recognition from both.

He always wanted to paint and, after 20 years sorting out his 6,000 patients' fillings and dentures, he abandoned drill for brushes.

Peter has also set up Keswick's nationally acclaimed Cars of the Stars Museum and is still buying up motors immortalised in films and television. He has 25 Bond cars, including the £214,000 Aston Martin used in Die Another Day and Harry Potter's blue Anglia.

He periodically puts them on the road for a run. Police have asked him not to use Thunderbirds' Lady Penelope's 22ft x 8ft wide shocking pink Rolls FAB 1. Drivers tend to get so distracted by it they crash. Taking Mr Bean's Mini, with its distinctive door-locking bolt, or Del Boy's yellow three-wheeler van are safer bets. Peter's two monster batmobiles Michael Jackson was after one of them and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang are prized possessions.

Peter trawled the world searching them out and has spent vast sums. He remains tight-lipped over most purchase prices, explaining that he has been prepared to sacrifice his home to clinch deals. It hasn't happened, yet.

This is a human dynamo, unable to find a switch-off button. Driven by an all-consuming, inexplicable force, he occasionally gives himself hypnotherapy to stop burn-out. He sleeps with a pad and illuminated pen by his bed. By morning, it is invariably filled.

Talk is fast, it has to be to keep up with what is going on in his head.

We talk art. It is where he is currently focused. The policeman's son had always wanted to paint, but his influential uncle, once Cumbria's Chief Constable, said he should be a lawyer or dentist.

School was something to get through. He only started to work at it after a mind-numbing stint labouring one holiday and scraped into uni by the skin of his teeth to do dentistry.

"Fillings and dentures became my art, so I got by."

Early in his career, Peter got the chance to buy a practice in Keswick. Patients flocked to make use of his hypnotism to combat terror of the chair.

"I always looked on everything I did with an artist's eye. I befriended and learned from whoever I could. I met Graham Bentham, a sculptor friend of Lowry. He became my mentor.

"When he died he left me all his equipment. It was the clincher. I took it as the sign I needed to change direction. At the same time, the perfect place for a gallery came up. It was all meant to be."

Last April, Peter sold his practice, put himself in his studio and worked night and day for two months. When Gallery 26 at 27 opened its doors in Keswick, it brimmed with breathtaking creations. Within the first weeks, 20 sculptures and 40 pictures had been sold. They cost up to £800 each.

"I had 20 years of bottled up inspiration in me and it flowed like tea from a pot. I sometimes feel like a person possessed."

Nelsonn Nanson does everything in multiples of 13 and 26, locking himself up in his studio on a Friday night and emerging triumphant at the end of the weekend.

In one stint, he produced 26 sculptures. Blind Faith, shaped in bronze, evolved while he was blindfolded. It was about feeling and faith.

"There is no aspect I will not cover, oils, watercolours, sculpting, ceramics. I'm a child in a chocolate factory.

"From the beginning, I've been overwhelmed with ideas. I am literally bursting. By the end of the first month David Hockney and the Tate in Liverpool were both interested in my work. I have been invited to become a Tate director.

"It's all as surreal as a Salvador Dali painting."

The car obsession screams down the fast lane, alongside his art. It started 15 years ago when television researchers spotted his old MG TC and wanted it for the Granada series The Spoils of War.

"At the same time as an old garage came on the market in Keswick, I was wondering what happened to cars from television and films.

"I made a long list of all the cars I could think of and went off around the world to find them. A great adventure opened up before me.

"It took me two years to get a Batmobile. I eventually wore Warner Bros in America down by phoning them every week. I found out Michael Jackson had been after it, but the company wanted it to go to a museum."

He has traced and bought Magnum's Ferrari; Herbie, the VW Beatle Love Bug; even Mad Max's police interceptor, making himself a marked man in Australia, where the Mel Gibson car and film had cult status.

"It was being displayed in a museum, I found out who the owner was and made him an offer. The Aussies were furious."

Peter has just opened a second Cars of the Stars Museum in Edinburgh and is looking for a South Lakeland site to house his growing collection of celebrity motorbikes.

He scratches his head, distracted for a second, then explains that he is a perfectionist in everything he does.

He has been thinking music. Amazingly

Gallery 26 at 27 resounds to piped compositions. They are not good enough for either Peter Nelson or Nelsonn Nanson, so he is about to compose his own. He'll do the recording too, as he plays the guitar

very well.

Arguably a genius, definitely a Midas, the name or names are set to reverberate in fine art and celebrity car circles for a long time to come.

June 5, 2003 14:00