Muir

Artist Sally Muir is a prodigious portrait painter of dogs, but she also paints human portraits, landscapes, and the occasional rodent and bird. Before this Muir had a successful knitwear business, Muir & Osborne. She has published a number of books about dogs.

I came to Bath accidentally when I met my husband, who was renting a cottage in Bath. I’ve always loved Bath and used to visit before moving here.

I was at art school for a long time as I was part-time. I did one year at Bath City College and five years at Bath School of Art in Sion Hill and Somerset Place. I loved it –all the buildings were crumbling around us and it had lovely overgrown gardens and lots of space and beautiful views. I was so lucky to be there at that time.

I was always making things as a child and teenager, and when I was about 23 I bought a knitting machine for £5. My brother told me that I should meet a friend of his who also had a knitting machine, so Joanna Osborne and I met up and decided to start a business together. That was over 40 years ago and although we stopped making knitwear last year, we still work together.

I went as a mature student to Bath Spa University when I was in my forties and I had a wonderful time. I had applied to go to the same school, then called Bath Academy at Corsham, when I was 18 and got rejected, so it was wonderful to finally get there. As my mother said at the time, “qualified at last”.

I used to work in publishing and although I enjoyed it in many ways, I hated working for someone else. I’m much happier working for myself, following my own pace. I’m not great in the mornings, so I can arrange my working day to suit myself.

I’ve always loved dogs, and have drawn them since I was a child. When I left art school I intended to become a portrait painter specialising in children. I used to be asked to paint the odd dog with the child, and I discovered that what I really enjoyed was painting the dogs. When Jo and I started our knitting business we both got dogs from Battersea Dog’s Home, Fanny and Alice, and they were very much part of our business. Several years ago we started writing knitting books, Knit your Own Dog, so dogs managed to infiltrate our business too.

My old whippet Lily died last summer, so now we just have Peggy who is a 10-year-old whippet, quite anxious and fearful about the world. She doesn’t really like other dogs, particularly ones she doesn’t know, which is tricky in my line of work. But she is a terrific model and sits in an armchair in my studio, available for modelling at any time.

There are so many cafés in Bath that it’s hard to choose my favourite, but I particularly like Vero’s Spanish Cafe in Milsom Place, lovely friendly people, and lovely coffee.

On a typical working day I tend to do any dog walking, admin, shopping and other things in the morning, and get down to working in the afternoons. I work in my studio every afternoon, which is the front room in my house –it looks like chaos, but I sort of know where everything is. I have different parts of it for different media: I print on top of a plan chest, draw large things on one wall, have an easel for large paintings and my father’s old desk for smaller paintings, with the drawers all full of paints. I’m walled in by a hostess trolley full of oil paints one one side and a pile of pastels on the other.

I usually have several books on the go. I’ve been reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver for ages. It’s the retelling of David Copperfield, set in Deep South of the US. It’s a brilliant transposing of the story, very dense, very heartbreaking, very clever. The other one I’m in the middle of is Jerry Saltz’s Art is Life. He is the art critic of New York Magazine and the book is a brilliant, succinct, funny survey of the last 20 years in the art world.

My new book Rescue Dogs has recently been published. This came about when I asked people via social media to send me photos of their rescues. They all came with wonderful stories, some very sad, some bizarre, some touching, but they were so fascinating and added so much to the portrait that I’ve added the stories. I’m vaguely thinking about a next book, but the last one was a mammoth job, so I’m not in a great rush.

sallymuir.co.uk