Jonathan Cooper Park Walk Gallery is pleased to present Large As Life, an exhibition of pastel drawings of wild animals - portrayed life-size - by Gary Stinton. Animals depicted include; the Jaguar, Cheetah, Amur Leopard, Lynx and Giraffe.

‘When portraying animals we can only hope to capture something of an animal's essence while attempting to make our pictures live. Life is the most important element in my work.’ (Gary Stinton)

Stinton works predominantly in pastel, echoing a tradition that goes back 20,000 years, when animals were depicted with pure pigments on cave walls. He works the pastels into museum board, a very pure and archival material. Pastels owe their permanence to their purity, being virtually pure pigment with a little gum tragacanth to bind them. Stinton finds the medium ideal for capturing the fur of the big cats and other animals he depicts; the pastels appear soft and dry, the pigments when applied catch the light at different angles, like the scales on a butterfly’s wing, which gives the work a luminosity not seen in other mediums.