sporting artist

blakey

At the end of a British winter it is hard to associate our dogs and horses with glamour, so the work of Georgea Blakey is like a ray of sunshine beaming on to the general bog of muddy dog and wet tweed. Perhaps this is because Blakey has spent much…

david williams-ellis

Britain is fishy. The UK is about 94,000 square miles in area but has a coastline of around 10,000 miles (depending how you measure it). Nowhere is more than 70 miles from the sea, and even those bits that are that far inland are connected by a wide network of…

Norman Thelwell

Their ponies were cheerful little shitlands. The children – mainly girls – grew up to manage careers and families and anything else that needed sorting out. The adults ran around picking up cast shoes and fallen riders and the pieces generally. Yet in this joyous chaos of wrecked marquees, ruined…

Jane Braithwaite

How do you paint the invisible? How do you capture the feel and the smell and the sound of being at the races on a raw, damp day in mid-winter? The wind drives a smattering of rain into the stands, and the turf smells of mud and bruised grass as…

earl family

FROM the 1850s to the present day, four generations of the Earl family, over more than 150 years, have been painting what it is that makes us tick. Now the Kennel Club has put together the first exhibition to span the whole family, not just in artwork but including letters,…

Emma Cawston, a country bumpkin at heart, has journeyed from Africa to the UK countryside with her oil pencils and has a diverse portfolio of fantastic paintings of wildlife and the sport of shooting. Janet Menzies talks to her to find out her process. SPORTING ARTIST: EMMA CAWSTON It feels…

The UK micro safari has always fascinated sporting artist, Richard Whittlestone, and has spent countless hours observing Britain’s wildlife to ensure he gets every detail in his paintings as accurate as it can be. RICHARD WHITTLESTONE Exciting lions and elephants charge across the canvases of so many wildlife artists that…

Henrietta Graham has gone painting. This requires a week aboard the Karen of Ladram in the North Atlantic, fishing mainly for cod and hake. It gave Graham a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘painting en plein air’. She says: “I realised immediately that I wouldn’t be able to set…

After a short time chatting with mixed media artist Mark Hearld, the rather uplifting realisation emerges that everyone is an artist – perhaps. Certainly everything is art when seen through Hearld’s eyes. It is his infectious wonder and delight at the living world around him that makes Hearld’s collages, prints…

RIGHT from the beginning, sporting art has been denigrated or, at best, dismissed as not worthy of consideration. When George Stubbs began work in the 18th century, equine and sporting subjects were considered fit only for inn signs because they weren’t religious or allegorical. His ground-breaking The Anatomy of The…