It all started with the dodo.
I had received a commission to draw one about three years ago, and after travelling to Oxford to study the last remaining head, I decided to try to paint the extinct bird as well.
(For anyone who does not know, the Natural history Museum in Oxford once owned the last ever stuffed specimen. It was accidentally thrown on to a bonfire during a clearout, and only the (rather charred) head was rescued in time. All dodos on show now are fakes or models, and besides a few skeletons, written accounts and paintings, this is all that remains of the dodo to us.)
Sat in a private room, the only dodo in the world in front of me, I was positively aquiver with the enormity of it all. God forbid I should drop it! And how important it now became to draw it to the best of my ability and then say something more about it!
Later, sat at my easel, I was also struck by the enormity of the challenge inherent in attempting to re-create an extinct bird realistically with no direct reference. However, the painting went well and during it I suddenly realised two things - firstly, how complacent I had become as an artist using photographic reference and secondly, how bored I had become with much of my own work. Here was an exciting piece of work to do - because it required thought, imagination, development, and enabled me to explore themes absent from my other work - such as extinction, genetic engineering and humanity's influence on the environment (see Notes on Illustrations).
As much as the painting was rewarding to do, it posed many questions that had ramifications for the rest of my work. I began to re-evaluate my art.
I had been painting full-time as a professional wildlife artist ever since leaving art college over a decade ago. I had been fortunate enough to travel to see some fantastic wildlife in places such as Borneo, India and Africa. Yet somehow I felt I was not saying what I wanted to about wildlife in most of my paintings. The more I looked at wildlife art as a genre, the more jaded I felt about it.
This is not to say I was jaded with my subject at all, far from it, I just began to question the integrity of purpose behind much of my work. My whole philosophy had begun to change. I sought a way of working that would allow me to examine and discuss subjects and themes to do with wildlife beyond simply the biological facts. Some of the themes I had touched upon with the dodo.
It was around this time that I met Ray Ching (he had asked me if I would varnish his recent paintings, as a bout of pneumonia had left him unable to use solvents). I had long been an admirer of his work and discussions with him in his studio helped crystallise my thoughts further.
He put it to me something like this: "What has happened in wildlife painting is like what happened in jazz when John Coltrane came along." - Now I should point out that I know next to nothing about jazz music, but he told me I would still get the point. - "Jazz musicians had built their sounds in the pursuit of developing what had gone before - and Be-bop had evolved. Then John Coltrane came along with a sound so beautiful, so perfect that from that moment on, no-one could produce jazz like that without it either being not quite as lovely or just more of the same. So jazz was obliged to become increasingly strange and difficult." It was the only place left to go to find originality, or to simply be different, or interesting, and this explains perfectly why much of modern painting is like it is today - art is no longer primarily judged on technique, it is now about having something new to say.
I felt this was why wildlife art was starting to feel tired. The likes of Robert Bateman, Alan Hunt, Simon Combes and (whether he realised it or not) Ching himself have gone before and said it all. Who could now paint a kangaroo or any other creature without thinking 'It is not as good or 'fresh' as Ray Ching's?' Like jazz, wildlife art can only grow now if it becomes different. Already this can be seen to be true if we think of what catches the eye in a wildlife art exhibition now - not the umpteenth tiger but maybe a naked mole rat or something painted in a unique style or medium. The search for something original, something memorable. Art should not tell you what you already know - it should ask questions.
Much of wildlife art, specifically high-realism painting such as I do, suffers from being reference-driven rather than ideas-driven. It is not justification enough to paint something just because you have a fantastic photo of it. As a friend said to me recently, "Long hours of technical craftsmanship is not necessarily creative - the creative process is in the mind." The more creative way to work is to have an idea and then figure out how you can make it flesh. And of course, that idea can simply be a traditional wildlife art one (such as the hunting behaviour of a fox) or something more unusual - but the principal is the same.
All this has led to a fundamental shift in the philosophy of approach I take to most of my work now. I am working on an ongoing project, loosely entitled 'Butterflies Are Monsters' (derived from a song-lyric). Butterflies seemed to me to be the perfect allegory for the global problems and consequences we are now so anxious about - millions of tiny, delicate, seemingly harmless things becoming something larger and more menacing, something unexpected. Although I have not painted a fraction of the ideas I have yet, the main thrust of the work will involve people being mobbed by clouds of butterflies or, as in the chaos theory pictures, butterflies seemingly linked to other occurrences. I wanted to use the butterfly as both a symbol of nature's fragility and humanity's increasingly irrational fear of the natural world - are swarms of butterflies really something to fear?
Some people have pointed out the similarity to Daphne Du Maurier's 'The Birds,' and that is exactly the kind of ambiguous tone I am going for. Simultaneously, I hope the butterflies themselves still represent what they are in reality - beautiful splashes of colour.
Another reason for working with butterflies was the fact that it would give me a chance to work more from life - painting direct from specimens and restricting the use of photography to informing my knowledge of flight poses, as in Nine Morphos. Butterflies are also traditionally symbols of the soul in painting, so this adds a further metaphysical angle to reading the paintings and of course their ability to metamorphose further alludes to a changing world.
I have tried to carry across these concerns to other work too. The Lottery was conceived after studying this amazing bird from specimens at Tring for a commission. Somehow the idea popped in to my head to have those platelets becoming raffle tickets, peeling off the bird and combusting. It is a totally enigmatic piece, but I like that - you can 'free associate' your own meanings in to it. It could equally be about extinction, genetic impoverishment, the randomness of consequences, hopes and fears, or the national lottery.
Obviously all this work can be difficult to classify - potentially shunned by both wildlife art for being too like contemporary art, and visa-versa. Already I have found this work easier to reject by institutions than accept, as it cannot be pigeonholed. This is partly why I have kept doing more accessible work on the side, such as the butterfly still-lifes and poultry breeds, and some conventional wildlife when so inspired. Chickens have particular appeal to me because they are man-made creatures, so are in one sense wildlife, yet not wildlife art. I do think some of this more unusual work ought to still be seen as much as wildlife art though - something like The Lottery or Chaos Theory II, for example. To my mind, who ever said wildlife art must remain what it has become?
