A SHAW THING
Wildlife artist and field sports enthusiast Clare Shaw tells her story
It’s chucking it down in the Borders, yet one of the country’s most popular country sports artists is working hard on her research. She’s hung up her shotgun for the summer so she’s fishing. Again. This time she’s on the Tweed, but next week she and companion Will could be on the Carron or the Spey. It’s a tough old life...
Clare Shaw is not a woman to do things by halves. While most sensible folk are wrapped up inside, she braves the wind, rain and formidable current to get into the water at Hendersyde, just above Kelso, even though the river has swollen to three times its normal size. Despite the fact that virtually no-one else is out on the river, Will catches three double-figure salmon and two trout in one action-packed hour, and Shaw is flogging the water like a woman possessed.
For once she didn’t have any joy on the Tweed, but days later she lands what she calls ‘the fish of a lifetime’, a 15lb bar of silver that she pulls out of the Spey in similarly trying conditions.
Shaw, however, is not some lady of leisure; this is work. Familiarising herself with the movement of prey species like salmon, pheasants, woodcock and hare is central to her burgeoning canon of art, and to her hugely popular field sports-themed silk scarves. She
‘My passion is pheasants, I’m completely obsessed by them’
hasn’t always been an artist though – in fact, she only started painting when she hit forty, and only as the consequence of a remarkable series of events.
‘Will was quite poorly in the summer of 2014 and while I was looking after him I coped by painting the pheasants and hare in the garden at the farm,’ she says. ‘I put one of my paintings on Facebook, someone bought it and it sort of started like that. Word got around and it just grew very quickly.’
She had wanted to go to art school in her late teens, but her business-oriented father persuaded her not to and she let the impulse pass. But it was only sitting in the farm garden on her breaks from nursing Will that she finally realised what she was missing.
‘It was a genuine epiphany,’ she says ‘It sounds a bit corny but it’s almost like a fire was lit inside me. It’s the movement that I love, and my most successful work has been based around that. Now my passion is pheasants, I’m completely obsessed with them.’
Shaw loves to work on a big scale, with most of her originals being four feet by six feet before they are scaled down to prints. There’s an element of caricature to her approach, while she admits that her work is Marmite, ‘but I’m fortunate that I don’t take rejection personally’.
Field sports art is an evolving genre that is moving away from the traditional – think Landseer’s iconic painting Monarch of the Glen – towards more quirky representations. Shaw has found a home for her playful renditions of pheasants at House of Bruar’s gallery, where a new generation of fieldsports artists such as Carl Ellis, Katie Hargreaves and Nicola Kavane – plus sculptors such as Sam MacDonald and James Doran-Webb – have become increasingly popular.
‘I love artists like Owen Williams, Sally Mitchell, John Trickett, Jason Sweeney and Sam MacDonald,’ she says. ‘ But Rodger McPhail is my hero – I love his work, although my work is not like his and never will be, even if I’m so flattered my stuff is hung next to his
in the Bruar gallery. It’s the same with David Miller, who is brilliant at fish. I won’t try to replicate his lifelike qualities; instead I’ll try to bring more character and humour to my work.’
Having taken the decision to throw herself into field sports art, the self-taught painter now finds herself on riverbanks and at shoots for a large proportion of the year. Will’s cancer means they don’t travel outside of the UK, but it’s also brought home to both of them how important it is to live every day, and for Will that means fishing and shooting as much as possible.
Shaw, who initially came along to paint and draw, caught a fish at Hendersyde 20 minutes into her first ever outing – ‘it was 17th September 2014, the day before the referendum’ – and has become a passionate countrywoman who spends as much time with a shotgun or fishing rod in her hand as she does behind an easel. ‘I am,’ she laughs, ‘completely addicted.’
Shaw, however, is also spreading her wings creatively. A keen shot who is a member of the Femmes Fatales shooting club, she tried in vain to find a silk Hermes-style scarf with a shooting theme to wear on a day out with the girls. When she couldn’t find one, her new challenge became to produce some. The result has been a line of printed silk scarves which have been flying off the shelf at shops like A Hume in Kelso.
‘Next up,’ she says, ‘are rutting stags, chickens, oystercatchers and especially partridge (‘I love them, they’re such stupid birds’),’ but she’s continuing to avoid dogs and people. Mainly, her work is about encapsulating the joy that she has gained from capturing nature in the raw.
‘With each painting I evolve, and so does my work,’ she says. ‘I believe that it all happened for a reason, which makes me very grateful and very humble at the same time. I can’t believe how lucky I am to capture these amazing animals and, more to the point, meet so many amazing people. Our countryside is so beautiful, so vibrant, and to be asked to help capture that has been the privilege of a lifetime.’