My Artistic Life with Animals by Dominic Latham.
My love of nature is something I have carried inside me throughout my life. From a young age I was fascinated by animals of all types and sizes which lead to collecting an unusual variety of childhood pets. I loved our families labradors and after the gift of a budgie for my fourth birthday (who I named imaginatively, ‘Chirpy’) I soon began breeding a menagerie of rare breed poultry followed later by reptiles. In my teens, snakes, lizards and geckos filled every corner of my bedroom (sometimes escaping to terrorise the family!) alongside the less controversial aquariums of fish and cages of dwarf hamsters!
Whilst on a family safari to the plains of Tanzania in 2013, I became enchanted by the many African animals in their natural habitat. Determined to capture these incredible creatures, I borrowed a camera from a kind uncle and aunt, with my own arriving to continue my passion the following Christmas.
After finishing school in 2015, having studied biology, geography and DT, I took a gap year to Singapore, Australia, Thailand, South Africa, Namibia and, my favourite of the lot, to Zimbabwe where I worked on a conservation project. It was in the Savé Valley Conservancy in Zimbabwe (add link to Save website) that I was able to put my camera to proper use for the first time.
I spent a lot of time out in the bush on foot with the scouts, where we would perform surveys of the flora and fauna, search for poachers’ snares and track black and white rhinos (on occasion, getting far too close!). Whenever it was possible I was capturing it all on camera. With this abundance of photos, I took on the challenge of hand drawing some of them during the retreat from the midday sun. I soon found that I not only really enjoyed capturing the character of the animals by hand, but from my first elephant pencil drawing it seemed I could achieve it! Pic of elephant drawing.
Having posted photos of my new found skill on Facebook whilst I was away, I was greeted home by a list of requests to draw pets of friends and family, with my first being a collage of farmyard animals in pencil. Pic of first commission (on google drive)
My interest in animals then lead me to a degree in Zoology at the University of Bristol, where I deepened my knowledge of the animal kingdom. Throughout my years at university, I continued to work on my commissions, developing my skills and experimenting with different mediums. Coming out of my degree, I knew where my interests in the natural world lay. With a love for animal behaviour, conservation, photography and art, I hoped I could incorporate them all in what was to come.
I found myself a few months later working in London for a company building hospitals in Africa. Though both interesting and rewarding, the job was not where my heart lay, and so it is now, during lockdown, that I have decided to follow my passion as an artist of domestic and wild animal portraiture, setting up a home studio with an ambition to incorporate photography and conservation (with plenty of trips to Africa) in the future.
