I wanted to create a strong mood in this image with rich contrast colours, empowering this kind stag, to highlight certain details of him, giving an effect of a glow as his presence appears from the canvas, which comes to life the longer you look at him.
With this thought in mind, I was looking for references and as usual if I don’t work on someone’s permitted image, I had to combine several images from different references to create my own vision of the stag. While searching, one of the images struck my heart, and I knew it was going to be perfect for what I have in mind. It needed to have strong emotion from the animal to empower me through the many hours required to it. I didn’t take much notice then, that I’d come across a stag image that was photographed after it was turned in to Taxidermy. This is the art of preserving an animal's body via mounting (over an armature) or stuffing, for the purpose of display or study.
The reference photo had few things that I still needed to research for; the neck had a different angle and the antlers weren’t in the photo, and therefore had to be added from other references for me to complete the look I wanted for my painting.
I hadn’t thought much about painting my stag from Taxidermy images, until I neared the end of my painting. On my final brush strokes, I had overwhelming emotional moment of gratitude from the taxidermy stag photo when I looked at both of them together side by side. Still with brushes in my hands, I had not yet realised I finished but as soon the emotion reached my heart, I knew I had finished. I felt that stag spoke to me with overwhelming gratitude for bringing him out of whatever experience he had at the end, and back to life to be living among us once again.
What interested me and was revealed to me through this painting, is how artists are constantly influenced by what’s going on and it naturally gets woven into our art whether we like it or not.
We can all help bring some things back to life.
