Some Hounds

Artist's Statement.

My father was a shepherd, growing up there was always a pet dog at home and at least four working dogs that visited, and a batch of pups that were raised at home each whelping season. Suffice it to say, there was never not a dog.

My first solo exhibition, back in 2007, quite fittingly, at Barebones Artspace was A Dog Show. And since then, dogs have remained a huge and abiding part of my practice. They have at times, kept the proverbial wolves from the door, (actual wolves I’m also quite partial to!). At moments when the larder looked worryingly bare, and the coffers low, an email would invariably arrive in my inbox, asking, “do you do commissions?”.

In the last decade or so, I have been privileged to be invited to several countries, Romania, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Phillipines, to paint and have found, almost to my own bemusement, that in these foreign locations, it is the stray dogs that have court my attention. The strays and their settings, how they co-exist on the peripheries of their communities.

In June 2025, out of the blue, a friend digging about in my ancestry, found Robert Fillans, my Scottish Great, Great, Great Uncle, an Artist and a painter of ….Dogs! The timing was impeccable, just as I was gathering this pack together, and the lineage, somehow, inordinately pleasing!

So here are Some Hounds, strays, studies for commissions, and some dogs I know and love. 

Some Hounds. Byron School of Art Project Space.

Robert Fillans. A Rough Haired Terrier Standing Over Today's Trophy. Oil on board, 1869.