Interview: Keith Brockie - Wild at art

Published on Wednesday 14 October 2009 18:57

KEITH Brockie peers into the large telescope outside his living-room window and invites me to view a group of red deer on a hillside a couple of miles away. A stag is seated regally among a small group of hinds.

Unusually demure, says Brockie. "Normally, at this time of year, they're stamping about roaring their heads off trying to get their harem of females."

Meanwhile, downstairs in Brockie's studio, a large oil painting of a stag at bay is taking shape as a sketched outline. "I'm trying to capture a more realistic stag than your typical Landseer, he says, referring to the 19th-century artist who painted the iconic Monarch of the Glen. "A stag in action, stamping around covered in mud. A Highland despot."

Brockie is one of Scotland's leading wildlife artists, and the author of six beautifully illustrated books. Although he has travelled the world to paint and draw wildlife, from Africa to Greenland, it's not unusual that inspiration arrives in his back yard in the village of Fearnan, above Loch Tay.

He pulls out a painting of a mistle-thrush he sketched in a nearby tree. With birds, he says, you have to work fast. His pencil sketches are then worked up into finished watercolours or oil paintings. "Luckily, in that case, I happened to have a dead one in the freezer, so I got the colours from that."

There are swallows sketched on the telephone wires, raindrops on their blue-black feathers; a black grouse lecking on the hillside, watched through the telescope, with one eye on the lens and one on the sketchbook. As our conversation continues, two buzzards start to circle outside the window.

Brockie likes to work from life, not photographs: "I try to do as much in the field as possible, painting and drawing from life rather than any other way. I can spend a couple of hours doing a sketch of an animal, if it stays still, whereas if you take a photograph you learn absolutely nothing about it." The telescope is an essential tool, meaning he can view his subject without disturbing it. "I like getting in a position where I can work with relaxed animals in their own environment."

Brockie has the healthy, weathered look of a man who spends a lot of his time outdoors. He has spent most of his life out in the natural world, whether as a naturalist or an artist – often as both. He is equally at home painting a picture of an osprey and climbing 18 metres up a pine tree to ring the legs of osprey chicks. "It's all about gaining knowledge and watching," he says. "You can paint things with greater conviction the more you know about them. It's all part and parcel of the same thing, a way of life rather than a job."

He has been passionate about both art and wildlife for as long as he can remember. Growing up in Haddington in East Lothian, he regularly cycled to the wildlife reserves at Aberlady to watch and sketch the birds. "I have the notebooks to prove it," he says. Now he is celebrating a major exhibition of his work at Waterston House, Aberlady, overlooking the same bay.

Brockie studied illustration and printmaking at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee and got a job working as an illustrator in a Dundee museum. "But I got out of that pretty fast, I couldn't stand working in an office."

His first book, Keith Brockie's Wildlife Sketchbook, was published in 1981 three years after he left college.

In 1983, he spent the best part of a year on the Isle of May, working on One Man's Island: Paintings and Sketches from the Isle of May. The island is home to important breeding colonies of puffins and other seabirds, and is also a stopping-off point for many migrants (in June he became the first to find and ring a rare White's thrush on the island). His time there was also the subject of a documentary for the World About Us series.

Twenty-five years on, he's keen to repeat the exercise. Stopping short of speaking scientifically about climate change, he can see changes in the natural world which concern him. "The seabirds are breeding later. When I went to the Isle of May first, the puffin numbers were increasing, they are declining quite a lot now. I think we're going to see massive changes in the next few decades that will affect the whole world. Seabirds seem to be the most vulnerable with the warming of the water. Then again, if the Gulf Stream shifts, we might get colder."

Brockie has taken part in environmental awareness projects in the UK, the Netherlands, Poland, Alaska and, most recently, in the Hula Valley, Israel. "Wetland areas in Israel are having a lot of problems because of the intensification of agriculture. I was with a group of international artists, drawing the wildlife and trying to raise awareness, helping to put a bit of international pressure on (the government] to preserve these areas."

In Scotland, he has worked for 20 years to support the growing osprey population in Perthshire. Using the telescope outside his house, he can locate the nearest nest, at the top of a towering larch. This summer, a pair of young birds raised chicks there for the first time. The family has now left to winter in Gambia or Senegal, but, all being well, the parents will return to the same nest next spring.

Ospreys were driven to extinction in Scotland between the wars. In 1982, there were just four pairs in Perthshire, which has risen now to 50. For local naturalists, it has been a hard-won triumph, putting up razor wire and mounting 24-hour vigils on nests to deter egg collectors. The practice has fallen off considerably since jail sentences were introduced for egg theft in Scotland in 2003.

Brockie's concern for wildlife and its welfare goes hand-in-hand with his appreciation as an artist. He shows me an almost complete oil painting of a golden eagle in flight, but he also speaks of his concern about the illegal persecution of birds of prey on shooting estates in Perthshire and Angus – typically by putting out poisoned bait.

But the time spent at the easel or with the sketchbook is often an unadulterated pleasure, and never more than when Brockie is drawing hares. On farmland a few miles from his home, he uses his telescope in his car to watch these animals at leisure. Crouching and muscular, each with its own expression and character, his hares are arguably some of his finest work.

Scotsman art critic Duncan Macmillan wrote of Brockie's hare painting in The Curious Eye: Drawing From Nature exhibition at the RSA in 2007: "(It is] as beautiful as the hare itself, but it is not just a borrowed beauty, something appropriated… a record of something seen, certainly, but also of otherness understood and wondered at, of empathy, of seeing informed by feeling."

"Hares are one of my favourite animals to work with," Brockie says. "They have such character because of their faces.

"Sketching animals, you become like the animals, you twitch when they do. Often people only see hares when they're running away, but actually they spend most of their time sitting around." Which makes them a perfect subject for a portrait.

&#149 Keith Brockie: Island to Highland is at the Donald Watson Gallery, Waterston House, Aberlady, until 25 November. For more information, contact 01875 871330