How I started doing Animal Portraits

"Crunchie"

I began doing really detailed portraits of people's pets as a sort of reaction to something a friend of mine said about my artwork.
At the time I was painting abstracts in earnest and was convinced I was the next Mark Rothko. Colour and Expressive Power were all I cared about back then, I had renounced most material things and my partner and I lived very simply and got by with very little. My daily routine consisted of: get up, paint, eat something, paint, go for a walk, comeback and paint. It was a sort of compulsion.
A close friend who was somewhat of a traditionalist, kept remarking that he thought I painted Abstracts due to the fact that I couldn't draw. In order to prove him wrong, I secretly drew a portrait of his pet dog and presented the end result to him during a drinks party.
He became very emotional and shed a few tears: Not because the drawing was so awful I might add, but because people tend to love their pets sometimes more than their own children. And when presented with a sensitive and charismatic image of their little friend, they can often well-up.

An Early Faisal Khouja Abstract

I've never thought of a Pet Portrait as  being somehow "Low Art". This subject matter is laughed off by snobbish Art critics as not being serious work, but I couldn't disagree more. Any subject matter can be tackled and artistic sensitivity applied to deliver a moving or important piece. Is there a subject more important to a man than the thing he adores most in this crazy world? (his dog I mean, not his wife!)
I have always continued to take Animal Portrait commissions alongside my other projects. Not only because this has been my "Bread and Butter" income, but because it feels good to deliver a piece of work to a client that I know will appreciate the many hours I put in to each piece to build up a lifelike and characterful work.

A Portrait of Ratty (a very lively Field Spaniel)

Further examples of my portraits can currently be viewed here

The Apple Tree

The Apple Tree

This is my oil painting of The Apple Tree. It was painted a couple of years ago when I was going through a particularly hard winter and was drawing on the last reserves of inner strength I had left, unsure of weather I would be able to keep going as an unknown artist. In this sense the blackbirds are kind of symbolic of my girlfriend and myself, eeking out the last bit of sustenance from a previous harvest.
The tree was in a garden of a house we were renting at the time. We had noticed that it was not producing very many apples and wondered if it needed a good prune. However I was a bit nervous about taking a saw to it's branches. A tree is after all a lifeform just like us and I wondered if it could feel pain, and thus resent having it's limbs trimmed with a blade. (I think I had been watching Lord of the Rings quite a bit and had the whole Treebeard and the Ents "Shepherd of the Forest" type of thing fresh in my mind) Anyway, one night, I thought it would be a good idea to photograph the tree while asking it to show me a sign that it was happy for me to selectively saw some branches off.

Millions of light orbs swirling around the tree

I was treated to a real show of light orbs that came swirling around the tree to give me the thumbs up. I like to think that these were magical nature spirits or faeries that sometimes can muster enough energy to show themselves in the visible spectrum or to be recorded on sensitive cell of a digital camera. And no it was not raining that night.

The Artist in the tree, saw in hand

So the next morning I went ahead and began carefully pruning the old tree, confident that I was not inflicting any pain on him, and thinking that the nature spirits and old Treebeard would be happy that I was doing the job with enough respect and sensitivity to the Kindom of Nature.

A small songbird in the Apple Tree

The next Spring I was delighted to see an abundance of apple blossom on the branches and we had a bumper crop of apples to boot. I even spotted this charming bird with his head thrown back chirping a sweet song to the heavens from the branches of the apple tree. I rushed to get my camera and was rewarded with this great shot which for me signifies the joy felt when the blossom of Spring bursts out in the warmth of the sun after a harsh and lifeless Winter.

A Sea Of Red

"Poppyfield" by Faisal Khouja

As the weather shows signs of improving my thoughts are turning to my next field trip. Maybe I'll sling a tent over my shoulder and head down to the South West Coastal Path in Cornwall. Last time I was there I was stunned by the cadmium yellow hues of the gorse in bloom against the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean.
Contrary to the common perception that England is a patchwork of pastel colours, I have found there to be an intensity of colour available for any budding painter to hunt down and study, especially in the Springtime.
My painting of the Poppyfield above was executed after having sat in a field for a few days near to where I used to live in the North Cotswolds. It had been a wheatfield the year before and they must have liked what was in the soil as this was a veritable explosion of colour to delight the eyes.
With the oil paintings I often work from memory. So after I had seared the essence of this field into my memory, I rushed back to my studio which was in an old farm building at the time to begin the work while it was still fresh.
There are no paintbrush marks in this work as it is done exclusively using syringes with a technique that I developed over 2 years. The technique is expensive and tricky to master but the results are more fluid and intense than using brushwork. As a struggling artist I guess it would have made more sense to go with the sheeple and use an easier methodology with my work and knock out more work in less time. Oh well next lifetime maybe...
I rang up the British Legion to see if they wanted to use my image in any of their publicity (in the UK we have Remembrance Day where everyone wears a red poppy to honour those who have died in war) but they replied that they were inundated with images of poppies already.
After a few days all the poppies in this field had gone over, just as well I managed to capture them in all their blazing colour before they disappeared just as quickly as they had popped up!