Linda's Paintings of Tigers are a Roaring Success

Linda Wain started her career as an artist at Royal Crown Derby, before becoming an internationally renowned wildlife artist. Today, she is due to return to the factory to talk about her work for fund-raising organisations dedicated to saving tigers around the world. Simon Burch reports.

Waiting for wildlife artist Linda Wain to finish one or her twice - weekly classes downstairs, I resort to counting just how many of her own pictures hung on the wall around me. There are 66 on this floor, and yet there are two more floors to look at! They are all different sizes, but they all feature one type of animal or another save for a few paintings of flowers. There are lions, swans, blue tits, otters and owls in a variety of colourful settings. There are also tigers, paintings for which Linda is particularly well known, and they swim, glower and growl from within their frames. Linda's husband, Kevin, walks in with a cup of coffee. There are even more pictures downstairs, he says, and upstairs in Linda's studio.

One by one, members of the prolific Linda's art class file out clutching their folders and soon she is ready to see me. Linda Wain, from Belper, Derbyshire has been a professional artist for 10 years and her publicity material (prepared by Kevin, her manager-cum-agent) says she is now regarded as one of Britain's leading wildlife artists. So respected is she that she has been accepted into the Society of Feline Artists — a rare honour — and countless people have bought and admired her work. It is the fine detail of Linda's paintings which is her hallmark. Every single one of her pieces is as fine up close as it is from further away. Standing right next to them you almost feel you could touch the animals and stroke soft fur.

When she paints a tiger, Linda faithfully reproduces every single strand of fur, every single whisker, every single marking. When she does birds, it is the same with the feathers. I've always been a fine detail artist, Linda says. It's something I seem to have had within me from the age of seven or eight. I've always had to make things look as real as possible. I have experimented throughout the years with different styles, but I always come back to the detail. This instinctive obsession with incorporating every last feature gave Linda a head start in her first job as an artist at Royal Crown Derby. Born in the city, Linda started at the bone china makers at the age of 15, in 1965. I'd always painted before that but they trained me to paint in fine detail, which in the end was perfect for me. It was just what I needed without realising it. She started by painting the company's Imari pattern on plates, learning her trade as she went along.

The lady who taught us started by giving us a white plate and we had to balance it on our little fingers and draw straight lines on it, she recalls. Then they started to teach how to load a brush with paint in a certain way and use just the right amount of water. Things like that all make a big difference and it all went along with training in how to hold your hand steady. Linda's mastery of the technique saw her graduate from plates onto figurines and then onto jewellery and the figures of birds. She was one of the finest artists at the Osmaston Road factory, but I wonder if the job recreating the same appearance on countless figures was boring. Not so, she says. You can use your imagination on many pieces, so if you're doing a figurine you can make up the pattern yourself and be creative with your colours. If you're doing a bird like a blue tit or a robin you've got to make it look like a bird so they're a little more limited but there's always one thing, like the ground they're perched on, so you can play around with that.

It's hard work because you are trying to create something so fine, but if you are into art you just enjoy it. I used to think I can't believe I'm being paid for this! Linda gave up her job at factory when she married Kevin in 1975. I moved out to Heage, she explains, and I found it very, very difficult to travel in every day. I think if I hadn't moved I'd still be working there. Despite the move, Linda has not severed her links with her old workplace. She is a regular visitor to Osmaston Road, where she is invited to give talks and do painting demonstrations. One of her visits takes place today. In 1975, Linda worked for Aristoc in Belper and then got an office job at another firm, which later went bust. It was when she was made redundant that she decided to make her artistic hobby a full-time job. It was a gamble and, like any artist, it was hard for Linda to get established. You have to build up a reputation first, so I began by building up a collection which I'd never had time to do before. I did quite an extensive collection of wildlife pictures and I used to go to shows anywhere I could and slowly my reputation developed. This happens by people seeing and admiring your work and they begin to follow what you're doing. It snowballs from there.

Since establishing her name, Linda's work has been used by a host of wildlife organisations for products such as greetings cards, including the RSPB, the PDSA and the RSPCA.

She is a passionate animal lover and tigers are her favourite, along with lions and snow leopards. I just find them all so incredibly beautiful, it's their texture and their eyes. The downside of Linda's association with Tigers is finding out more about the animal's perilous situation. Of the eight original subspecies of tigers, three have become extinct in the last 64 years. At the beginning of the last century, there were an estimated 100,000 wild tigers. By the end, this had shrunk to just 8,000. They are threatened by habitat loss, the fur trade and the Chinese medicine market. In the Far East, tigers whiskers are still firmly believed to relieve toothache and their brains supposedly good for treating pimples. It is estimated this growing trend of traditional medicine accounts for one tiger a day with people willing to pay high prices for tiger product. In Taiwan, a bowl of tiger penis soup costs about £210, causing lips to smack among diners looking to boost their virility. Linda says: It's very heartbreaking when you hear of the multitude of different ways that poachers seem to find to kill them. It's absolutely dreadful the way they make them suffer and they humiliate them as much as they can.

They believe it makes the medicine more powerful, which is total rubbish. They sometimes tie them up in the most incredible fashion and slit their throats and things like that. It's awful, I've got photos that would give you a heart attack. Linda has never seen a tiger in the wild, They're very elusive you could spend a month looking for them in India without ever seeing one, she says - but has an ambition to travel to Asia to look for one. If things carry on the way they are, she may never achieve this ambition. Such is the rate of the killings, tigers may only be seen in zoos or on adverts for Esso. Away from her work with tigers, Linda is constantly looking for new inspiration. She will never desert British wildlife but, in her efforts to find something new, she and Kevin travelled to Kenya in January. Their trip involved a whistlestop tour of game parks and they returned with 30 rolls of films of animals, some of which Linda has already converted into pictures. The couple have extended their home and her studio is upstairs at the back. She has two large easels for bigger pictures but her current project, a tiger in water, lies unfinished propped up on folded cloths on a table, underneath the light of standard lamps.

The room was custom-built for Linda, a good thing, bearing in mind the hours she spends there. A typical day would involve starting at lOam and finishing in the early hours the next day. That I think happens when I become inspired, especially if I'm having a good day and the paint's tripping off the brush and everything's working. I get so excited to watch something come alive and I can't stop, I just keep going. Linda says she was born to paint, but says there are times things are not progressing so swimmingly. If I'm having a bad day, I'm not very nice to know, but I have several pieces on the go at once and if it's not working with one of them, I'll switch to another, she says. One of Linda's latest pieces is a large picture of two lions. As ever, it is highly detailed, right down to wispy hairs on the male's mane. It took her five weeks to complete using liquid acrylic. Her dedication and her incredible attention to detail throw up a problem though. Namely, Linda never knows when to stop adding hairs here and there. I'll be sitting there debating whether it's finished or not and Kevin will walk past me and whip it away from me and say yes, it's finished, she laughs. I could just go on and on and on otherwise.

This article appeared in the Derby Evening Telegraph on November 18th 2000.

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