dog painting :" the pointer and the hawk"

	French		Espanol

The Pet_Portraitist

"The Falconer's dog painting"

The Collector's dog --.>

As soon as my first dog painting, "the hunter's Jack Russell" was published in the magazines, I received a very friendly phone call from a falconer in Belgium giving me a commission to paint his pointer exactly in the same spirit, but on the theme of falconry. Here is this new watercolor dog painting, staging a dog and his master's hobby.

Claude Rigo Gavriloff, a passionate and fascinating man, breeds and trains falcons. At that time, he was the hawking worldchampion for his high-flying birds.
He wanted his pointer, his peregrine falcon and all his falconry equipment to appear in this painting.

You can see how the dog and the falcon are excited and impatient to go outside. . To them, when all the equipment was laid out on the armchair, it meant pleasure and immediate departure.
"Feed-back", the falcon, was, alas, shot down by a dove breeder a few days before I finished the painting.

Each book in this bookcase has a meaningful title. On one of them, I remind Claude that he owes me a puppy from his bitch, who had such a good nose that I once saw her pointing a fly in the garden.

The highest shelf of a bookcase is called "the hell". It's here that you hide the books not meant for children. I had fun dissimulating a few classical hot authors like Anaïs Nin.

His young falcon was already a wonder in crow "hawking" and Claude was very proud of it.
This explains a few winks in the titles of the books in the book-case, like Corneille Le Cid.
Well! Perhaps it's a private French joke. Corneille was a very famous French dramatist of the XVIIIe Century. but the word also means crow.
"Le Cid" is one of his most famous plays and means also "to kill".

Nevermind ! It's my humour and Claude had fun finding these accomplice details.

You can see my signature on the yellow book

Ink Portrait of the falconer
When I visited Claude Rigo at his home, I noticed a photo-portrait where the shadows were so sharp, that the falconer resembled a falcon. The snapshot was taken in Spain during a hawking championship. I did an ink portrait from this photo. I even made a bet with myself that I could paint it in a day. As I don't like to lose, I did it, but you can imagine that I didn't stop working from sunrise to sunset.

I don't usually work so hard. It was an interesting experience!
I called that portrait "Metempsychosis" . Claude loved it.

The next dog painting represents an antiques collector's interior and is dog
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