Angela Harding

From her studio in the Rutland countryside, creates prints inspired by the landscape and wildlife around her

ooking up from the desk in her studio at the bottom of her garden, printmaker and painter Angela Harding spies a shape silhouetted against the sky through the large window overlooking the Rutland countryside. She identifies the shape instantly by its unmistakable reddish-brown body, angled wings, forked tail and the way it hangs gracefully looking for prey. “A red kite,” she says. “We get lots of them around here. I haven’t done anything with them though. I must.”

It’s safe to say Angela knows her birds. Dunnocks, cuckoos, kestrels, buzzards, owls, robins, chaffinches – bird life provides endless inspiration for her work, which beautifully depicts the flora and fauna of the British countryside. She is yet to draw or paint a red kite, however. The blackbird, on the other hand, is a regular protagonist.

“I love blackbirds,” she says. “They’re my favourite. They’re always around and look you in the eye as if they’re

LRosanna Morris

William Shaw saying something to you. I love their ordinariness and sharpness, their simple shape.”

But rather than become an ornithologist, Angela pursued a career in the arts. From 1979 to 1982 she studied fine art at what was then Leicester Polytechnic and later obtained an MA in the subject at Nottingham Trent University. As a student she focused on anatomical drawings. “It sounds slightly macabre but I’d collect and draw ‘keeper’s gibbets’ – jays, stoats, crows, rooks and magpies left by a gamekeeper. I also picked up roadkill and drew that.”

Angela has worked in print since the early 1980s but her career really took off 10 years ago, when she moved to a Rutland village, aptly named Wing. She chose the house in which she lives for its large garden, where she built her studio. Today, her art is comparable to that of her contemporaries Mark Hearld and Angie Lewin. They all share an interest in natural history, although each uses different techniques and has their own distinctive style.

“It sounds slightly macabre but I used to collect and draw ‘keeper’s gibbets’”