I’m a Bird Group curator at The Natural History Museum, working with the largest and most comprehensive collection of avian material in the world. I’m personally responsible for the acquisition of new material, and the preparation and repair of bird study skins. I’m also on the Committee of the Guild of Taxidermists. So, what’s all this got to do with art? Well, a lot actually.

In my youth I enlarged upon what was already a keen passion for birds in order to better understand the subject matter of my pictures. I spent countless hours on taxidermy and anatomical drawing from specimens stripped down layer by layer in the same way as Stubbs did his horses. I also became a qualified ringer in order to handle loads of birds and travel to exotic places. Which I do.

Over the years the birds in my artwork have diminished in favour of the landscapes they inhabit which gives a better feeling of the whole, I think. I’ve kicked out drypoint as my No. 1 medium and am playing around with oil paint and large drawings these days. My greatest passion is for walking, or more accurately exploring landscapes and building up a collection of small field drawings (not drawings of small fields) that I may or may not work from later. Few people get to see these.

My training was in Fine Art and Natural History Illustration – no science at all, so it’s ironically down to my art that I landed such a fantastic job in the NHM’s Science Group.

 

 © The Natural History Museum

I’ve always had more than a soft spot for Audubon and frequently do media presentations on the old chap, though nowadays my artistic heroes are Symbolist Gustav Moreau and the Chinese landscape painter Fu Baoshi.