Mike Emeny, August 2005

Mike is a local artist working from his home in Los Hidalgos, currently specialising in oil paintings of animals and pet portraits. Art has been his life-long love, but animal painting is a fairly recent venture which started when a friend returned from a safari holiday in Africa and asked him to paint an elephant from her photos. She was thrilled with the result and showed it to another friend who immediately asked for a dog portrait. "I used to work as a technical illustrator constructing very accurate 3-point perspective drawings of machinery." says Mike, "In my spare time I was painting little watercolour landscapes for a company that supplied galleries all over the UK. It was great to be able to do something creative and know that people were displaying my art in their homes. Since moving to Spain I have had the space and time to work in oils, which is fantastic. I now work in a much more artistic way, painting directly onto a blank canvas with no prior drawing. Oil paint is such a forgiving medium, I can wipe out and over-paint until I get the result I'm after."

Over the next few months Mike plans to extend his classes, he is currently teaching a small group covering everything from perspective drawing to oil painting. If you are interested in joining or would like to commission a painting, you can contact him through his web site www.graftek.net/paintings, email mike@graftek.net or telephone 952 890 993.