Jeff Brown - Artist
Hi, my name is Jeff Brown and I'm a professional artist based in the UK, specialising in animal portraits. I'm delighted to welcome you to my website and to be able to tell you a little about my work and my approach.
As a child I discovered I had a natural talent for and interest in art, and have been interested in animals for as long as I can remember. I feel very privileged to be able to combine these passions and to have made it my profession. But the greatest privilege of all is to be able to present my clients with a likeness of their beloved animal captured for perpetuity. Sometimes the response of the client is overwhelming, particularly when the animal has already passed away.
I work exclusively in pastels, which I feel to be the best medium to capture the subtleties and intricacies of the animal's facial expression, coat texture and - most important of all - the light in its eyes. The eyes are truly the window of an animal's soul, and are probably the most important single detail in a painting. If the eyes aren't right, somehow the painting doesn't quite work.
Method & Style
I mostly paint dogs and horses, both head and full body, but have also painted several commissions of cats. People have asked if I get bored with painting - say - black labradors or bay thoroughbred horses: but each one is totally different, both in looks and personality. As every animal owner knows very well, each animal is unique, with its own character and idiosyncrasies, which I am able to bring out in the portraits.
This is much easier if I can meet the animal, but for my more far-flung subjects I have to rely on information supplied by the owners. Sometimes, quite a lot of subterfuge can be involved, because some of my portraits have been commissioned by someone other than the owner as a surprise present. When this has involved my having to photograph the animal myself, it can be quite an operation, involving split-second timing and a great deal of ingenuity!
As with a lot of animal artists, I work mainly from photographs which can be sent to me via e-mail or post or, if local (a radius of 25 miles), I can meet the animal and take the photographs myself. If owners live a long way from Leicestershire but do not feel comfortable taking the photograph themselves, we can arrange to meet at a mutually convenient venue. The most memorable photograph I took was of three labradors in a car park, where their Scottish owners had arranged to meet me. As you can imagine, getting three lively labradors to sit still with their best profile showing was not an easy task: fortunately for me, they were extremely well-trained and responsive to their owners' commands.
People might wonder why they had to be photographed together rather than separately. It is true that I have often done composite portraits, with several mini-portraits in one painting. The most recent one was of four horses (all but one of whom had passed away), each shown mid-jump. But the owners of the three labradors wanted to have a portrait of all three dogs' heads together, and in this type of portrait the light has to be coming from the same direction, because light (and shadow) is crucial in making the painting really "live and breathe". Even for single animals, the quality of light and shadow in a photograph can be crucial. The better it is, the better the 3-D effect I can achieve.
But it is not always possible to get a good photo to work from. Many of my commissions have been long-departed animals of whom the photos were quite poor. I remember my toughest challenge was of a cat which had died some time before and of whom there was just one very poor quality photograph. I did wonder if I would be able to get any kind of likeness, but the owners were absolutely delighted with it. In fact, they phoned me to tell me that they put the painting on the floor while they hammered in the picture hook, and their other cat kept examining and sniffing round the painting: they were sure it recognised its much-missed companion!
Perhaps the most obvious question about what I do is: if an owner already has a photograph of their animal, why do they need a painting of it? Perhaps the best way I can answer that question is to say that a good photograph captures the animal's image: a good painting captures its soul.