The Royal Ascot Racing Club

Robert Davies

Robert Davies graduated from the London College of Printing in 1988. After working as a cycle courier in London he worked in a street hospital in Calcutta, India. Subsequently he lived in a VW camper van for a year traveling throughout the United Kingdom taking photographs. With the resulting series he was able to gain a place to do an MA at the Royal College of Art.

After a spell teaching he now works full-time as an artist and in the last few years has concentrated on a number of projects: making large abstracts of the night sky in the deserts of Iran and the US; with FIFA and the footballer Pele on their centenary project; with Richard Williams, chief sportswriter of the Guardian, on a book called 90 minutes; and with the BAR Honda Formula 1 team, and most recently large drawings of both racehorses and the animals of food production.

The drawing series entitled Animals (of which some are displayed in the exhibition) was inspired firstly by renowned racehorses and also from regular visit to Robert's local animal sanctuary in Offenham, Worcestershire. The drawings are of racehorses and farm animals. Robert remarks:

"Racehorses are held in high esteem and often given human characteristics when they are described: they are 'strong', 'brave', 'spirited', 'intelligent'. The animals of food production are measured by their productivity ('conversion') and treated in a way that reflects this.

"The horses are all great champions of both flat and National Hunt racing. The animals of food production were originally used on farms, but each was sold, discarded or lost due to ill health, poor conversion or bad weather. Now they live at the Farm Animal Sanctuary, in Worcestershire. My intention with this work is to reinterpret our relationship to these animals through representation."

This new turn from photography to drawing has received international interest and the series is to be exhibited as a whole in Wolverhampton Museum and Art Gallery in March 2011 entitled Animals.

Robert's work is in public and corporate collections such as: University of Michigan Museum of Art USA, Cleveland Museum of Art Ohio USA, Le Museìe Elyseìe Lausanne, Switzerland, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, United Airlines, The Economist London, Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland and FIFA.

Nichola Eddery

Passionate about drawing and painting from an early age, Nichola has dedicated herself from her A-levels onwards to pursuing a career in art.

After a gap year travelling through Africa, Nichola studied at Charles H. Cecil Studios, Florence, Italy where she was able to develop her painting skills. She spent two and a half years learning the classical techniques of drawing and painting and understanding the importance of working from life. She was taught the Atelier Method, which is a "sight size" approach, used in portraiture and life studies. This method can be traced back to the Old Masters, ultimately to the works of Leonardo da Vinci and this method is at the basis of much of her work.

In December 2003 she left Florence and returned home eager to pursue a career in painting. The intensive training received in Florence and inspiration derived from the works of John Singer Sargent, John-William Waterhouse, George Stubbs and Alfred J Munnings have contributed to her unique style. Since returning to England she has enjoyed producing a great variety of work, although horses and portraiture have become her principal subject matter.

Nichola has been awarded commissions to paint well-known horses such as Sadler's Wells for Mr and Mrs John Magnier, Lion Heart for Mr Derick Smith and Motivator. She is also regularly commissioned to produce group and single portraits.

Currently busy working on commissions, Nichola is also preparing for an exciting venture in November that will take her to the Middle East to paint.

She has shown work at the Mall Galleries in London, as well as exhibiting for the past 3 years with The Osborne Studio Gallery in their Sporting Life exhibition and annual 'Impressions of the Turf' exhibition.