The Art Of Nature

Watercolourist Clare Mackie spent years living in London, but has finally followed her heart home to her beloved Scotland

- POLLY PULLAR

NATURE and animals have always inspired Scottish artist Clare Mackie - and the weirder and more wonderful, the better.

From the stirrings in meadow grasses of minute insects rewing up their little engines to the details and colours of a toad's warty skin, the empty snail shells and fragments of birds' eggshells, the dried husks, seed pods, feathers and skulls.

All these beautiful fragments of nature provide rich scope for her pictures.

As a tiny child, Clare was like a magpie, collecting and examining the fascinating things she found - things most would overlook. She describes her work as "quirky watercolour", but it's hard to fit her style into any genre.

Her keen eye for minutiae is astonishing and, despite the humour in her work, the hats and gloves, the belts and shoes, and the patterns of clothing worn by her subjects, the portrayals of the wild or domestic are sharply accurate in colour, form and character.

She misses nothing in textures of feathers or hair, and her sense of the ridiculous is evident in her priceless depictions of the eccentricities of the human condition.

Brought up on a large arable and pig farm in Kincardineshire, Clare was also inspired by her artist mother, whose glorious gardens provided a constant wealth of material. They both loved the work of Ronald Searle, Edward Lear and Quentin Blake.

Clare always knew that becoming a professional artist would not be straightforward.

"I took a year out after school and went to Dudhope Art Centre in Dundee, where the brilliant James Morrison helped and supported me while I did an A-level in art and design, as well as evening classes in life drawing at Duncan of Jordanstone. It was an intense and creative year. I then went to Edinburgh College of Art for five years to study illustration, ceramics and printmaking.

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