Ever since the Stone Age when men cast color and
form on dark cave walls, there have been drawings, paintings and etchings of
animals.
That’s what Simon Bland does – he paints animals - equine,
feline, and canine.
Simon Bland, from Yorkshire, England, started to
sketch and paint oils when he was a child.
It was a pulse, a heartbeat, his need to sketch and
paint, to create, mostly for himself as a hobby, and this for the longest time,
since he studied engineering at Cambridge, particularly aerodynamics, then worked
for Rolls Royce in Derby, England and, after that, as a management consultant
for Price Waterhouse in London.
Science and engineering was his public life and art
his private love. Simon said, “I was so
unfulfilled.”
Simon came to Virginia in 1993 and met Kate at
Clyde’s and didn’t want to travel any more.
“When the dot com boom ended,” Simon said, he was
left “wondering what I really wanted to do with my life.” The destruction of his professional life as
he imagined it, the life he found unfulfilling, created the opportunity, gave license
to study watercolors and to draw and sketch.
Stilson Greene, an award winning illustrator,
painter and editorial cartoonist in Leesburg, saw Simon’s art work.
“Stilson told me,” Simon said, “that I had the
potential to make a living through art.”
“While I felt like it was a leap into the unknown,”
Simon said, “my wife Kate empowered me to take it.”
His first most frequent models were their dogs. “We had two chocolate labs, Sammy and Maddy,”
Simon said. “When they passed, I painted,
Hannah, a yellow lab adopted in 2003 and Nikko, a cattle dog, adopted in 2004.”
His strokes and line are clean and imaginative, his
colors bright and realistic, the forms are romantic or heroic. “I try lots of different approaches,” Simon
said, “and work at it.”
George Stubbs was also self-taught and he painted
animals, mostly horses. Simon’s style of
painting is more like Stubbs’ heroic painterly way in oil or pastel than
something more jarring, say like Franz
Marc, as brilliant a painter as Marc was;
incidentally, Simon has done some magnificent horse paintings.
As Simon is self-taught and well-practiced, he might
resist the comparison to a great English painter like Stubbs, but there is no
question that Simon has earned a reputation as an exceptional portrait painter
of animals and their owners; indeed, in the last ten years, he’s painted over
400 dogs, horses, cats, persons and homes.
“One of my favorite portraits,” Simon said, standing
at Morven Park where he was meeting and greeting passersbye at a horse show, “well,
I made for the dog’s owners who were just here talking to me. They love this portrait of ‘Lady,’ they told
me, because Lady is gone but they have this wonderful image of her.”
Simon added, “I tried to get a picture of this boy,
Ben, for a commissioned portrait, and he wouldn’t look at me. I rode around in the back of a gator, that’s
how I did it, and he smiled, and I got this photo, and that photo study was how
I was able to paint the smile that you see in his portrait.”
Are you glad you did it, became a painter full time? “Yes,” Simon said, smiling, “and I couldn’t
have done it without my wife, Kate.”
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