BIOGRAPHIES OF SELECTED ARTISTS
David Cemmick 1955-
George Edward Lodge 1860-1953
David Cemmick was born in Darlington, County Durham, in 1955, and turned to wildlife art following a training in animal anatomy at the World of Nature, Yorkshire. He was appointed Senior Lecturer in Environmental Illustration at the University of Sunderland for four years during the 1990s, but he has generally preferred to pursue his passion for wildlife through field expeditions around the world, including Kenya, Gambia, New Zealand, Madagascar, India, Europe and the Far East. In recent years, he has collaborated with the Master Mould-maker Sebastian Wylder (born 1971) to produce powerful, keenly observed animalier sculptures.
George Lodge was an outstanding artist. born in the same year as Archibald Thorburn. He was to live, hale and hearty, to the ripe old age of 93, painting to the last. Lodge’s enthusiasm for painting birds never left him and he lived long enough to see the publication of the twelve volumes of Bannerman’s ‘Birds of the British Isles’. With this work Lodge achieved his life’s ambition to draw all of our native birds. Lodge was also a very skilled taxidermist, who would often comment that it was impossible to draw the outside of a bird satisfactorily without an intimate knowledge of the inside.
John Cyril Harrison 1898-1985
Alistair Makinson 1961–
As a very young boy Harrison showed an outstanding talent for drawing, and his later sketch books reveal a rare understanding of form and draughtsmanship.
Harrison studied at the Slade School of Art, and for many years lived and worked in Norfolk. Like Edward Lodge, Harrison improved his knowledge of the anatomical structure of birds by becoming an excellent taxidermist.
Alistair Makinson was born in Whalley in Lancashire. He only started to paint whilst recovering from a broken elbow, and his first few exhibitions were so well received that he decided to turn professional after only a few years of painting. It was in 1996 that Alistair started to concentrate on sporting paintings, and in 1997 Malcolm Innes of the Tryon Gallery invited him to exhibit some of his Scottish River scenes in a Christmas exhibition in London. The preview was attended by HRH Princess Margaret and the following day a private viewing was arranged for HM the Queen Mother. With royal patronage Alistair’s career has gone from strength to strength. He still lives and works in the Ribble valley.
As a painter, Harrison was described by Aylmer Tryon the founder of the Tryon Gallery as an artist whose depiction of birds in flight surpassed even those of Archibald Thorburn.
Eric Meade-King (1911-1987)
Harrison usually sketched in the field and his work has an immediacy and life which captures the movement and character of his subjects. This extraordinary talent places him firmly in the vanguard of the best of the 20th century bird artists.
A prolific sporting author and artist, Eric Meade-King was educated at Malvern College and Westminster School of Art. His earliest exhibitions at the Greatorex Galleries in London, in 1937 and 1938 were enthusiastically received, as were his illustrations for Sport and Sportsmen of the New Forest by C.R. Acton, published in 1936 and ‘Hunting for All by the same author, published 1937, and his first work both written and illustrated by him, entitled The Silent Horn, Summer Sketches of Horse and Hound (1938). After serving with the household cavalry in the Second World War, Meade-King resumed his career as a sporting writer and artist.
Edward Lear 1812-1888 Edward Lear is ironically best known today for a piece of nonsense verse called ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’. Sadly Lear’s charming if somewhat nonsensical poems and limericks obscure a huge talent as an artist. Lear began painting at the age of sixteen and was only nineteen when he published ‘Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae or Parrots’. Lear’s brilliance came to the attention of the entrepreneurial John Gould and Gould enlisted Lear to help produce ‘The Birds of Europe’. It has long been argued that it was the lifelike and naturalistic Lear drawings which transformed Gould’s works, but Lear, with his faltering health – he was an epileptic - lack of business sense and general naivety never received the credit he deserved in Gould’s publications. However his genius is well recognised today and Edward Lear lithographs always attract a premium amongst collectors of ornithological works.
126