The soaring talent of animal sculptor Geoffrey Dashwood.

The late Sir Kyffin Williams RA stated that he bought Geoffrey Dashwood sculptures for three reasons; 'firstly because they are beautiful works of art: secondly because of his great knowledge of nature and thirdly because of superb craftsmanship'.  So how as an entirely self-taught sculptor earned such unqualified praise from so eminent a source?  I first travelled to Beacon Wood, Dashwood’s Hampshire home in 2007 and I have recently revisited this fascinating man, his studio and work.

The genre of the animalier – that is a sculptor or painter of animal subjects – is strangely neglected today.  In recent years Elizabeth Frink, Nicola Hicks, Barry Flanagan and Sophie Ryder have each explored the form as had Constantine Brancusi, Henri Gaudier, Picasso and Rembrandt Bugatti before them.  Humans, horses and even dolphins have been somewhat 'done to death’ in bronze, but who else has considered sculpting pigeons and crows?

A thoughtful man, plain spoken and self contained, Geoffrey Dashwood is 69 this year and the leading sculptor in his field, a position the self-taught artist has attained through hard struggle and entrepreneurial drive.  His own unique 'spare’ style of sculpture is primarily about form, with the unexpected use of colour.  He knows birds and their character, their every quirk or gesture.  As Geoffrey himself explains 'Birds have been a personal passion since childhood, and I am constantly and inexplicably drawn back to them for inspiration’.

Hampshire born and bred; Dashwood hardly received a conventional artistic schooling.  One of his teachers remembered 'a dark haired, rather solemn boy who was exceptionally gifted as a draughtsman and painter’. The young Dashwood won a scholarship to Southampton Art College, but he left after just three weeks.  In his late teens Dashwood joined the Forestry Commission which is arguably where his real art education began.  As times changed the F.C. began shifting its focus from primarily commercial timber production to other issues such as tourism and conservation.  By now married (to Val, his staunch supporter through many difficult years) living in a Forestry Commission cottage and earning just £10 per week, Dashwood unwittingly became the Commission’s unofficial artist in residence.  Hampshire County Council offered him a modest freelance contract and in his mid twenties Dashwood became a self-employed artist.

Over ten years of painting and illustration Dashwood got no-where commercially.  However, Harry Horswell, the then proprietor of the Sladmore Gallery, saw sculptural qualities in Dashwood’s drawings and encouraged him to experiment with three dimensions.  Emboldened, Dashwood spent £5,000 of borrowed money casting some models and in the early eighties drove to London in his Morris 1000 with vacuum flask, sandwiches and a Gladstone bag of small 'French’ animalier style bird bronzes.   In one day he sold to Harrods, Garrard and Aspreys and to the Sladmore, Tryon and Malcolm Innes galleries.

Despite this early success, Dashwood was still freelancing as a deerstalker to make ends meet.  To complicate matters, he was losing interest in the tight, academic treatment that found favour in the Bond Street milieu.  Experimenting with simplification and abstraction, creating more personal, original and expressive work, Dashwood was about to jump from the nineteenth century to the twenty first in one stylistic leap.

The breakthrough came in 1986, when Dashwood’s first life size bronze of a Mallard won the Society of Wildlife Artists Best Sculpture Award at The Mall Galleries, London.  It is extraordinary how Dashwood’s subtle treatment so immediately captures the subject’s quintessential 'duckness’ in cold, hard bronze.  With his second piece, 'Woodpigeon’, he confirmed the individual style that he has subsequently explored and developed into maturity through over two hundred models. 

Dashwood studies his subjects acutely, measuring specimens during the studio process.  'To get a piece of sculpture out of a small bird is quite difficult’, he observes.  Composition is often worked out primarily through a series of sketches.  These serve as a blueprint from which Dashwood creates a plaster model, which is then painstakingly worked by hand.  The completed models are then sent to a specialist fine art foundry.

The bases are interesting in themselves.  As opposed to the heather banks or gnarled twigs of his earlier more detailed works, Dashwood’s subjects now interact with pure geometric forms – perhaps a disc, cube, sphere or cylinder.  An American Kestrel hangs from the top of a figure of eight 'infinity loop’, a Red-billed Hornbill crouches on a pyramid.  Dashwood’s bases not only serve to display the subject, they are integral to the whole – as when a Song Thrush finds a snail under it’s open pyramid base or a Reed Warbler clutches  a single reed salvaged from a piece of discarded fishing rod.

Antique bronzes and public bronze monuments are invariably dark brown, grey or black.  Yet the two natural colours of bronze are its raw copper brightness and the natural patina of verdigris, acquired by exposure to the elements.  Any other colours are a result of surface treatment with heat and chemicals, a process known as patination.  Geoffrey is a keen exponent of this technique and is fascinated by the collaboration of colour and form.  'True patinas are a reaction between the copper constituent and a chemical application’ he says. 'Other patinas are achieved by an oxidizing process on the metal’s surface.  I have been experimenting with different chemicals and techniques over many years in the search for exciting new patinas’.

Geoffrey pointed to a Snowy Owl which had a white patina attained by using bismuth nitrate.  In stunning contrast, a Scarlet Ibis has been patinated a startling translucent red.  Some bronzes use several colours to echo a bird’s own distinctive plumage.  Others have a mottled patina covering the whole bronze.  A painterly approach lends every piece an added dimension with a patina appropriate to the form. 

Dashwood’s Beacon Wood studio occupies one end of an oak framed barn.  This building is gorgeous and light – there is a glazed partition to the two-bay gallery space where some sixty pieces are ingeniously displayed.  Outside you amble around a modern Japanesque single story house and through the gardens to view Dashwood’s larger works and appreciate how changing light and shadow plays with the pieces’ subtle curves.  These include a gigantic six times life size Grebe and an equally imposing twelve times life size Frog.  But the 'showstopper’ has to be a giant Peregrine falcon.  A photograph without any reference points can make this piece look like a 1930’s car mascot but the sculpture is huge and walking underneath is akin to walking under an aircraft.  Indeed, the Peregrine falcon is the world’s fastest animal and this iconic one and half ton bronze is not just an artistic but and engineering marvel, realized with the absolute economy of form and composition that has become Dashwood’s signature.

Dashwood has noticed radical changes within the contemporary art market since the arrival of the world wide web.  He now rarely exhibits in commercial galleries and has found that collectors will happily contact him via email or telephone after viewing his website, (www.geoffreydashwood.com ) those that make an appointment to view appear to enjoy talking to the artist directly rather than via a dealer.  Attendances and sales at Dashwood’s home studio and gallery are buoyant. 

Towards the end of our meeting, Geoffrey reflected on the often-fantastic prices achieved by today’s crop of installation/conceptual artists compared with the works of original figurative artists who seem handicapped by their craftsmanship.  This begs the question, what is the place of representational sculpture in an art world apparently obsessed the conceptual.  Personally, I would always choose original work born from practiced skill and innate aesthetic sensibility.  In the final analysis, Dashwood is an artist in and of his time, self taught, formed by his own experiences and quietly getting on with producing superbly crafted individual work that is both commercially successful and creatively admirable.