Antlers

The steady gaze

Face to face

Imagine stepping quietly into a clearing just as the light comes up. Mist still hangs low between the trees. The grass is heavy with dew and the cold catches in your chest. Then something lifts its head on the far side of the clearing.

It doesn’t run. Not yet. It simply looks at you: ears spread wide to catch every sound, dark eyes steady, antlers rising like the bare branches of a winter tree. For one long breath, neither of you moves. The forest seems to go silent around you both.

Then, with no hurry at all, it turns and is gone into the trees, and the clearing is only a clearing again. What stays with you is the gaze: calm, watchful and entirely unafraid.

The wonder of antlers

Antlers are one of nature’s quiet marvels. In most deer species, antlers grow on males, with a new set growing every year. The antlers are shed and regrown in a seasonal cycle.

While growing, the new antler is soft, covered in velvet and richly supplied with blood vessels and nerves. In some deer, growing antlers can lengthen by more than two centimetres a day. Over the following months, the antlers harden and the velvet is shed, leaving a new crown ready to be carried through the seasons ahead.

Each set of antlers is a year’s growth made visible: built, carried and let go, then begun again.

The artwork a portrait in open space

This portrait wastes nothing. The deer faces us head-on, centred and symmetrical, with only its head and neck shown. Everything around it is left empty, and that open space is what gives the image its presence. There’s no forest, no horizon and no story to read except the animal itself. The antlers rise high on either side, branching and reaching until their tips nearly touch the top edge of the coaster. Below them, the ears spread wide and alert, their inner hollows carefully shaded. The eyes are dark and direct, looking straight out at you. The muzzle narrows to a softly rendered nose, and the neck tapers downward into a gentle point, giving the whole figure a graceful, almost heraldic outline.

The real pleasure is in the detail. The fur is built from countless fine strokes. It is smooth and close across the face, then fuller and longer down the neck, where it seems to ruffle. Light gathers on the forehead and the bridge of the nose. The antlers carry subtle ridges and shading, so they read as solid and weighty rather than flat. The longer you look, the more the portrait seems to look back.

In slate and in wood

The composition appears consistent across the two pieces, but each surface changes how the portrait reads.

On slate, the deer seems to emerge from darkness. The head and antlers glow pale and silvery against the deep charcoal ground, the dark eyes and nostrils stand out sharply, and the natural uneven edge frames it all like rough stone. The effect is luminous and quietly dramatic, almost like moonlight.

On wood, the same portrait is drawn in warm brown tones on a lighter, honey-coloured ground with rounded corners. The antlers and fur read in rich sepia, and the dense strokes of the neck come forward in darker texture. It feels closer to a fine pencil study: warm, earthy and intimate.