Frances Daunt

Do you concentrate on one medium, or do you work in several?

I work in several media, quite often more than one at a time! I feel that this really helps keep my work fresh and enjoy working out how I can apply techniques used in one medium to an entirely different medium. That said, at the moment the majority of my work is either in pastels (my old favourite) or acrylics (which I feel that I have really got to grips with this year and am particularly enjoying!).

One of the reasons that I particularly enjoy pastels is that I can work on multiple pieces at one time and can spend any amount of time from a few minutes to a few hours working. It isn't so easy when painting to just work for a few minutes and then stop (lots of brush washing etc also involved!)

Before I start a picture I usually have a gut feeling about which medium will work best, but even then I have been known to swap from paper to canvas (or vice versa) at the last minute.

Depending on wall space available the work showing in my exhibition will be a mixture of my large underwater scenes painted in acrylics alongside my map art. The map art is fairly unique – birds or animals painted and pasteled onto vintage maps. So if you want to see my pure pastel work you will have to wait until a future exhibition.

Tell me about your workspace. 

My workspace is an area off of our living space at home. This suits me quite well as I am then still very much a part of the household. My two dogs can mooch about or sleep near where I work. I have a desk, just about enough space for an easel and storage for my paints and pencils. Would I change anything? Well that would be a definite yes! I would love to have a bigger space with better storage and better light. Most of all I would love to have an assistant who would do all the admin type jobs that are associated with being self employed!

 What inspires you?

This is an easy question for me. For my whole life I have been inspired by wildlife, animals, nature, the sky and the light. For a long time that inspiration was just internal, pleasure from walking and being outdoors, backed up with a bit of photography. Then about ten years ago I started creating artwork and it has always been about the animals! People often ask me if I have a favourite animal and I will reply, yes the one I am drawing or painting at the moment! This is because I research the animal I am working on and the more that I find out about them the more interesting they become!

Quite often I will be out walking and see a fox or badger or owl or hare – when I get home I will then invariably start to plan a new piece of artwork featuring that animal.

I love the whole process from start to finish. I love getting the inspiration and working out how to make my vision happen, I love sketching and planning my picture then executing my plans and I absolutely love getting a piece back from my framer and seeing what it looks like when it's finally wall-ready! There is one bit that I don't enjoy so much.... I don't particularly care for painting animal's ears! For some reason they always get left until last – then I take a big breath and finally get around to getting them done!

 Do you have a favourite piece in your Little Gallery exhibition? 

Two favourite pieces actually! The Happy Turtle was one of the first of my underwater paintings inspired by snorkelling whilst visiting my son in Indonesia. As well as being connected to so many lovely memories I also love the colour scheme of the picture and the peaceful feeling that it evokes. Whereas most of my paintings are wrapped and stored when not at exhibitions, The Happy Turtle lives, very happily, on my living room wall!

The other favourite of mine is Arctic Bubbles. There is only a limited edition print of this one available. When I finished this piece I was kind of hoping that it might stay with me for a little while as I grew rather attached to that polar bear! However, I had about four people asking about it before the paint was even dry and it eventually went to a lady in Lincoln. The print is however a very accurate copy of the original.

How did you start doing what you do? 

Good question! I have four children and actually home educated them until they were 15 so I had spent a lot of my life working to my own time schedules. Once they were all at school I knew that I wanted to work for myself but had no idea what to do! I have always been creative, so tried a couple of different 'arts'. My attempts at sculptures were pretty dismal so I soon gave up on that, photography is something that I have always loved, so I looked into that for a while, but during that time I had a go at wet felting and realised straight away that was what I wanted to do. I started creating felted animal artwork and won many prizes for my work. Initially my animal artwork was all felted art, but gradually I moved away from felting on to drawing and then painting both of which I much prefer. I now rarely felt – although I do get commissions every now and again from people all over the world asking me to create a felted picture for them!

 Do you work on your creative business full time, or do you have another job as well? 

I decided at the start of my journey into the art world that if I was going to make it work I needed to have that incentive, so from the very beginning it has been my full time employment. I felt that if I made money elsewhere it would remove the incentive for me to work as hard at my artwork. This has lead to a very happy few years of very little money but a lot of fulfilment from what I do!

 If you have spare time, what do you do with it? 

The life of an artist can be pretty sedentary so in my spare time I like to walk, run and exercise with my dogs. I also like to spend time with people as working on my own can be lonely at times – one of the reasons I enjoy doing shows is meeting with so many people, particularly because the people who enjoy my artwork are also interested in nature and the environment so we have a lot to chat about! 

What's next for you? 

I always have a list of shows and exhibitions to keep me busy and I am sure that in the run up to Christmas I will also have a good number of map art commissions to work on. When I get some spare time for painting 'just for me' I have a few more underwater scenes swirling around my head that I would really like to commit to canvas too. Maybe another polar bear.....