I have always felt a special relationship with the animal kingdoms, recognising the being within each animal form and acknowledging each as having their own spiritual journey such as we experience and having their valid thoughts and feelings, albeit different from our own.
Animals have a great connection to the joy of life and exhibit an ability to simply ‘ be’ that is lovely to watch – for example birds riding thermals.
Watching and being with animals has shown me a delightful sense of humour in their behaviour and I feel so annoyed when they are regarded by the scientific community as having no ‘higher emotions’. That just means that they don’t
know any.
I use the image of certain species in a symbolic way mostly and
sometimes just decoratively.
Horses represent freedom and strength, I am very fond of them and have had many horse-friends.
Dogs have been special to me all my life, they have always been, in my experience, gentle, steady and loving, even when that was not my human experience. I have known and loved many and am grateful to those who have lived with me for their support.
Wolves are more the romantic side of dogs as they have their wild freedom.
I have had several companion wolfhounds and they are connected with wolves for me in my images.
Elephants bridge between wild and and tame – I have met several in India, where, of course, you can touch them and communicate with them and where they live useful and appreciated lives. The ones I have met have had a nice feel to them and those who worked with them treated them kindly and respectfully.
I am extremely fond of gulls and crows, birds often disliked by people but I love their bold and extravagant body language and the shape of them.
The white birds that appear in my pictures are images of the pure sense of spirit and are no specific kind of bird. For the same sort of reason I include butterflies in pictures quite often.
Hares are wild and free, they represent, for me, an aspect of the beautiful British landscape and the folklore here. Whales are beautiful and free and perhaps serve as an oceanic version of hares in my mind.
Big cats are beautiful and a little scary so they represent fears and sometimes longings and the fears connected there.
There are one or two pictures that have a narrative apart from that general explanation, for instance;
The White Cat’s Dream is a little story about a cat falling asleep on a picnic rug. He dreams of little white birds and the possibility of catching one but then the dream turns into a seagull, who is bigger than the cat appears.
Watching the oranges – once I had a pair of wolfhounds named Cai and Thor, they used to sometimes sit upright together watching something and I loved the way they looked together.
Thor, unusually for a dog, really liked oranges and used to watch us eat them, hopefully. So here they are watching an orange tree, in case an orange drops off.
Dreaming that We Fell is about that falling sensation that one sometimes has in a dream, a couple and their cats are all having the same dream.