Biography
Geoffrey Dashwood was born in Hampshire, England in 1947.At the age of fifteen he won a scholarship to study fine art at Southampton College of Art, but left after a brief period, preferring to study directly from nature.
He worked in varied occupations to support himself and experimented in various art mediums and techniques in his spare time. His last employment was with the Forestry Commission where he was engaged as a keeper in the New Forest. He also became the unofficial artist in residence for his employers. Dashwood left the Forestry Commission in his mid-twenties to pursue a freelance career in art and he soon received commissions for illustrations and design work, whilst concurrently drawing and painting independently.
In the 1980s Dashwood discovered a gift and a passion for sculpture. His earliest works were small, highly realistic studies in the mainstream of traditional English wildlife art and comparable in style to the famous 19th century French Animalier School of Sculpture. Although these early works brought him commercial success, he became increasingly dissatisfied with the constraints of realism and the lack of personal expression the genre afforded him.
Dashwood started to experiment with larger life-size and monumental works and began to eliminate all superfluous details, creating boldly modelled pieces. He refined his sculptures to attain smooth, tactile,pure forms, further enhanced in bronze by the application of coloured and multi-coloured patinas. In these sculptures he combined his own aesthetic ideals, establishing a distinctive style which is now internationally recognised as being quintessentially Dashwood. His affinity for and empathy with birds and his unique ability to express these emotions to others through his sculpture is undisputed. Dashwood’s work is exhibited and collected worldwide.
Dashwood is simply an artist in and of his time, formed by his own particular experience and getting on with his work. The point rather is that an innate sympathy of approach suggests itself inescapably in his work, in the simplicity of the principle forms and the natural authority with which they are resolved together, movement set against stability to create an imaginative dynamic that would be as real and alive whether the image were a hawk or no more than a block on a column.
All art is abstract, only some more some less. For the artist, the trick is only to establish the balance and proportion appropriate to himself, by the terms he sets himself in the work. With his birds Dashwood does just that.
William Packer - Art Critic Financial Times
Geoffrey Dashwood certainly knows his birds in the character of their every quirk and gesture, and perhaps there are those of a more literal cast of mind who would neither see or would wish to see any further or deeper into his work. Yet even to them, their responses to his birds could only be as deeply satisfying as they are, by being so formally resolved and accomplished even before any quality of description begins. Which means, to put it another way, that in their essence as works of art, they are very abstract indeed.
Dashwood is simply an artist in and of his time, formed by his own particular experience and getting on with his work. The point rather is that an innate sympathy of approach suggests itself inescapably in his work, in the simplicity of the principle forms and the natural authority with which they are resolved together, movement set against stability to create an imaginative dynamic that would be as real and alive whether the image were a hawk or no more than a block on a column.
All art is abstract, only some more some less. For the artist, the trick is only to establish the balance and proportion appropriate to himself, by the terms he sets himself in the work. With his birds Dashwood does just that.
William Packer - Art Critic Financial Times
National & Private Collections Include
Her Majesty The Queen, The Royal Collection, Sandringham,UK
Sascha M Rockefeller, USA
Mr & Mrs O Kelly Anderson, USA
The Leonard Andrews Museum, Pennsylvania, USA
Mr & Mrs Anson McC Beard, jr. USA
The Duke of Boxborough, Floors Castle, Scotland, UK
Lord Derwent, UK
Oleg Derev, Moscow, Russia
Linda Schuler and Richard Donner, USA
Mr & Mrs Walter A Eberstalt, USA
Mr & Mrs Stuart Engs, USA
The Financial Services Authority, Canary Whalf, London,UK
Frogmore Ltd, London, UK
The Gana Art Collection, Seoul, Korea
Lady Getty, UK
The London Golf Club, Kent, UK
William Gredley, Cambridge, UK
Ben Ali Haggin, USA
The international Centre for Wildlife Art, WallsworthHall, Gloucestershire, UK
The Koch Collection, New York, USAJ
Jazz Johnson Merton, USA
The Yves Micheli Collection, Geneva, Switzerland
The National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson Hole,Wyoming, USA
Oxford University, UK
Mrs. Kerry Packer, Australia
Perenco Ltd, Paris, France
DLJ Phoenix Ltd, Corporate Collection, London, UK
The Rare Bird Club, London, UK
Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA
The Joel Schur Collection, New York, USA
The Scottish Seabird Centre, North Berwick, Scotland, UK
Mrs William Shay, USA
The Honourable and Mrs Alan K Simpson, USA
The Honourable John W Warner, USA
Sir Kyffin Williams RA - bequest to The National Museumof Wales
Mr Eli M Wilner, New York, USA
The Worrell Collection, Virginia, USA
CONTACT US
