Project Tag: Philip McCulloch-Downs

Philip has been drawing and painting for nearly all his life, beginning with dinosaurs and spaceships at the age of 4, moving on to giant architectural cityscapes whilst at Leicester Polytechnic doing an Illustration degree aged 22, then indulging in a decade of portraits, patterns, model-making for museums, designing T-shirts, and mixing up multicultural influences in colourful ways.

Aged 32 he moved out of the city to the countryside of Somerset and changed his lifestyle from vegetarian to vegan. He spent the intervening years refining and exploring his chosen craft by learning how to process the experiences of everyday life through his artwork, forming a visual diary of his life in paintings, poetry, novels and videos.

During that time he became fully vegan when he joined Viva! (www.viva.org.uk) in 2003. This amazing organisation educated and inspired him, and all his personal artwork and writing became strongly influenced by animal rights/vegan themes. Since contacting the animal rights photographer Jo-Anne McArthur in 2014 and (with her support) creating a portrait of her and her work (‘The Ghost Camera’) everything just came together, and all the drawing/painting since the age of 4 suddenly had a purpose.

Now fully committed to the vegan/animal rights art movement, he\’s gained a following on social media, and produced a series of prints, cards, T-shirts as well as a series of hard-hitting ‘Anti-dairy’ and ‘Anti-pig farming’ canvases and videos for Viva!\’s campaigns (using their investigative footage).

I hope to use all my skills to fight for this cause from now on.

Philip’s Website & Social Links: www.philipdownsart.co.uk www.youtube.com/user/sbl2323 www.facebook.com/PhilipDownsArt