‘I’m definitely a dog person’
Two things that make Fiona Stevens happy are engineering and painting dogs. She tells BEE BAILEY about their similarities
SYSTEMS engineer Fiona Stevens can identify the sound of a Merlin or Wildcat in the distance long before it comes into view above her Somerset home.
Her love of helicopters started when she was a child and she’d watch the search and rescue teams fly over the Tamar Bridge, near where she grew up in Cornwall. It made her want to work on “anything that flew”.
Years later, with an engineering degree under her belt, she got her perfect job working for Westland Helicopters in Somerset and fulfilled her dream by working on the Lynx, Sea Kings, Merlins and Wildcats.
Now, by day, she is a systems engineer at the Wiltshire branch of the defence research and development company Qinetiq. And in her spare time she paints cockapoos, collies, great Danes, spaniels and bulldog puppies.
If engineering and art seem like an unlikely pairing, Fiona believes they have similar elements.
“To me, it’s still about finding out how things work,” she says comparing painting to what she does as an engineer. “I enjoy the process of painting as much as what I come out of it with. I like playing with the paints and how you mix different colours, I like trying out different techniques.
“When I’m building [engineering] solutions for people I work very visually. Although I sit in front of the screen and we have drawing tools on [the computer], I like getting a pen or pencil out and working on paper first. So I think the two things go together.”
Fiona, now 55, had to drop art at the age of 14 when she opted to study science subjects at school. But when a friend was diagnosed with bowel cancer and given two weeks to live, Fiona decided to pick it back up again.
“The last thing my friend said to me was to [go] and enjoy myself. It seemed like a good philosophy to live by. She had so many things that she wanted to do and never got the chance to. I thought, ‘If I don’t have a go at the art now, I might never get round to it’.”
Fiona started by painting landscapes but quickly realised she had an aversion to green. She took a 100-day challenge to get in the habit of practising every day. Using brown packaging she’d salvaged from a parcel, she made a concertina book with 100 sections in it, then painted each one with a small picture of somewhere she’d visited abroad.
Dogs was the next obvious choice of subject, starting with a portrait of her sister’s dog. The results, she says, were “pretty appalling”.
It is by practising, taking courses, and experimenting with techniques and materials that she’s got to where she is today.
A one-to-one session with artist Helen Elliott proved particularly useful, satisfying her engineering brain by exploring different mediums to find out what did and didn’t work for her, and giving her a positive attitude to making mistakes.
“The biggest thing I got from that day with Helen was, ‘You can’t do it wrong’,” Fiona says. “I suppose I thought, ‘You have to paint it right first time’ and when things were coming out wrong I was disappointed. Her attitude was, ‘If you don’t like it you can scrape it off, you can paint over it, you can stick things on it – just keep going until you are happy with it’. That was a real eye-opener.”
Next month she is looking forward to exhibiting at Bath Art Fair for the second time, showing her charcoal drawings and paintings done in the brightly coloured acrylics she favours.
“My friends laugh at the fact my paintings have a lot of brown in them since I like such bright colours, but that’s the nature of doing dogs,” she says.
Fiona has been a dog lover all her life. In her family there’s a Chesapeake Bay retriever, a spaniel, Labradors and basset hounds, and her parents had Airedale terriers. The first was Frobby – a name chosen as a compromise between Fiona’s choice of name, which was Fred, and her mum’s choice of Bobby.
“We had Frobby for years,” Fiona says. “Mad about snow. She and my mum came to visit me at college one winter when we had a lot of snow and she kept waking us up in the night because she wanted to go out and play in it.
“Right up until she died, she still wanted to go out and play in the snow.”
Next came Olly. “She used to sleep in my room when she came to stay. She had the most fantastic Paddington hard stare that would wake you up. A few more years I think she would have developed telekinesis and could have got the biscuits herself.”
Then her parents got a rescue Airedale called Maya, who is featured on a metre-wide canvas that hangs on Fiona’s living room wall, curled up on a pink blanket with her head lolling over the side of her favourite armchair.
Another favourite is a fox terrier called Pluto, painted on a zesty orange background. Fiona asked the dog’s owner if she could paint a picture using a photograph they’d posted on social media. She was delighted with the finished piece.
When it comes to dogs, Fiona could list a dozen reasons why she loves them so much.
“Part of it is about unconditional love; you can become the centre of their world. It’s the companionship; the love and comfort you get from them and every single one of them has their own character,” she says.
“There’s been a joke over the years that I have animal magnetism because I attract dogs; they know I like them and they come to see me. I’m definitely a dog person.”
Although she loves all sorts of dogs, there are a few furry faces that are guaranteed to make her reach for her brushes.
“I must admit I do like terriers, the square face makes them my favourites. It’s not about the breed, there’s something about that dog when I see their photo that I have to have a go at. They tend to be the ones that have a bit of character. I’ve got a couple laying on their back with their feet in the air just being general idiots. Or it could be the expression it’s pulling or the way it’s sat. And there’s something about dogs’ noses that I can’t resist.”
It’s those characteristics that Fiona tries to capture in her pictures. Building up layers of paint, she starts by sketching out the features – an inquisitive look, soulful eyes, a cocked head – then adding a strong background colour because she hates working on a plain white canvas.
“Then I do a really splodgy layer of putting the right colours in the right places. My paintings go through a blurry stage, much like what I see when I take my glasses off – not a good time to show the client a progress photo,” she says.
“So much of my [engineering] work life is about absolute detail so I decided when I started painting was that I didn’t want to do photo-realistic paintings. I want to get the character of the dog in as little paint or charcoal as I can.”
The results are warmly received by animal lovers, especially when she’s been commissioned to draw a dog that has died.
“It’s about getting the character right so the person knows it’s a painting of their dog, not just a dog that happens to be the same breed,” Fiona says. “I did one a while ago for a friend who wanted to get a painting for their parents. Their dog had died and they realised they didn’t have many photos. I managed to get the expression and the way that it was sat and I had a lovely email from them saying it was better than winning the lottery.”
■ Visit www.fionastevensart.uk to see more of Fiona’s art. Prices start from £120 for a 6in x 6in painting or drawing. A 24in x 24in would typically cost £480, including UK p&p.
■ Fiona Stevens is exhibiting at Bath Art Fair, which runs at Bath Pavilion, North Parade Road, from February 23 to 25. Visit www.bathartfair.co.uk for details.