Pollyanna Pickering

 Naturewatch's interview with the renowned wildlife artist

Sitting in the Naturewatch office just prior to the World Animal Day festivities, Pollyanna Pickering was recalling an incident in the foothills of the Himalayas. She and her daughter, Anna-Louise, were tracking tigers with an Indian guide on elephant-back. The path took them down a steep valley and up the other side. Each tiger pawprint is as unique to the individual as a fingerprint to a human, and they were on the trail of one which had passed by some considerable time previously; as they did so another tiger burst out of the bushes charging at them; with the steep incline Pollyanna found herself face to face with it. Her elephant reared up and she slid off the back – only quick action from the mahout, grabbing the back of her jacket before she dropped to the ground, saved her. The tiger, having just killed a sambar deer, saw them as potential competition at the feast.

Make no mistake, there is more to Pollyanna Pickering than cute pictures of Christmas robins!
 

She and Anna-Louise had travelled down from Matlock in Derbyshire, next to the Dales. It’s less than 50 miles from where she was born and brought up, on the edge of Rotherham. They’re a strikingly tall and elegant pair, and there’s an obvious synergy between them. Anna-Louise, an accomplished photographer herself, had not intended to work for her mother but, when the theatre company she worked for went out of business, she soon became addicted to the endles variety work which working for Pollyanna offered. Twelve years later, she was recently named Personal Assistant of the Year for 2004.

One of Pollyanna’s most striking characteristics is her generosity. She provides the designs for Christmas cards free of charge, as she did also for the First Day Covers. When I asked her what she finds the most rewarding part of her work, she said straightaway that it was being able to support animal welfare groups and conservation charities: she almost apologised for saying this as she felt it sounded cheesy saying so in the Naturewatch office, but there is nothing cheesy about her open-handed generosity. It is, she says, her way of ensuring that her work makes a difference.
 

Pollyanna with her daughter Anna-Louise at Naturewatch's World Animal Day event
 

Her love of nature came from early childhood, peering outside at night as barn owls hunted over the adjacent fields – it’s easy now to perceive the inspiration behind the barn owl paintings which appear in her Christmas cards. Although she spent three years at the Central School of Art in London, her most formative influence was a lecturer at a small art school in Rotherham: although sarcastic, hard and tough, he was a brilliant artist full of ideas who expanded her artistic horizons. It was here that her early dreams of becoming a dress designer were withered, and she began to look towards becoming an illustrator.

After leaving London she discovered a major gap in her education: how to make enough money as an artist in order to survive. She became a teacher, which she found frustrating and unfulfilling, so she decided to take the risk of becoming a freelance artist. A local shop showed her paintings: abstracts, still lifes, industrial scenes – all of which failed to sell – and animal pictures, which were rapidly bought. Revealing a keen business sense, Pollyanna knew in which direction her artistic career should grow. It was not a difficult decision given her love of nature.

With her abilities she could take the easy option and have a comfortable life selling paintings of adorable puppies, but she has a passion for endangered species and an appetite for adventure which is rarely dimmed. After accepting advice that two blondes striding alone through the Amazon would end up as dead meat, they decided that Belize would be safer: although a scorpion in her bed on the first night and a tarantula in the shower the following morning ensured that ‘safer’ remained a relative term.

Possibly her most challenging experience, though, which was their trip to the high Arctic in search of polar bears. For twelve nights they endured temperatures around –40ºC, living in tents or in igloos if conditions were particularly bad. As nothing grows on the ice, they had reconciled themselves to eating meat; what they had not expected was that the meat would be raw frozen caribou, pieces of which were hacked off which they could sit and chew until it was soft enough to swallow. However they were glad not to have the one vegetarian dish that the Inuit offer – the contents of a caribou’s stomach (seasoned with crunchy ptarmigan droppings).

By the end of the interview I began to suspect that, if you were to look carefully at one of her Christmas robins, you might find that its feathers are made of burnished steel.

First Day Covers | Christmas cards
Pollyanna's web-site