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Mike's art sells in many countries including America, Australia and Scandinavia. His first limited edition print, an edition of fifty Irish Water Spaniel prints, sold out at its Crufts release in just three and a half hours. He now rarely accepts private commissions - only when time permits and a four-year wait is not unusual. The work is stunning, make a point of looking out for his prints and original drawings. You will be impressed. Peter Tamblyn-Embling - Art Critic |
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(Condensed and updated from Our Dogs) |
...up to 1965I was born in 1948 in the Essex country village of Orsett, England but at the age of five my father's work took us north to the town of Sale in the county of Cheshire. This is the only piece of work remaining from my days at Sale Grammar School and I have always been rather pleased with this ballpoint pen study. The drawing shows the school's copse - a small patch of woodland surrounding a pond - which was behind the school in a corner of the athletics field.
Even in those days I preferred to work in monochrome - studying the underlying essence of an object rather than its superficial colour. 1966At 18-years old, having graduated from school, I attended Manchester College of Art & Design for my pre-Diploma year. Here we were introduced to a large array of materials and techniques - I learned to gas weld, for example - whilst traditional skills were also encouraged. his hyacinth bulb pencil drawing (16" x 9") is one result of that period. |
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From the turn of the year (1966-67) are these two large 20" x 14" pen & ink drawings of pine cones. | ||||
| I was also fascinated by comic images - many resulted in drawings, others in sculptures >> | ||||
1967 to 1970Leeds College of Art & Design - Little work remains of this period. The route I explored began with painting and drawing, quickly moved into sculpture then progressed into electronic music (before the birth of the Moog synthesiser so I had to hand-build all my equipment). I had designed a kinetic sculpture that included a simple electronic sound generator - I built the generator, found that I couldn't afford to build the sculpture, then became fascinated by the "shapes" and "textures" that sound could create. My major project (a controlled environment designed to counter all senses except responses to sound and light) was never constructed due to cost although the extensive plans still exist. |
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Later, after leaving College, I found many parallels between my drawing techniques and my method of building up electronic music - layer on layer, finally re-applying the "bright" highlights that the process consistently muddied. |
1979 on...The art goes commercial |
 In 1978 my wife Jenny asked if I would draw a motif for her dogs pedigree forms... she never got it but our business had begun. I drew nothing but dogs over the next three weeks - each night I would plan the next day's drawing and each morning I was enthusiastic to begin. Gradually the work improved - this unsigned drawing of a Chihuahua was the first to succeed beyond my expectations.
Commissions soon came from Jenny's friends in the world of dogs and the word gradually spread (I have never advertised) until I had enough commission work to think about taking the business seriously. Until then I had been supporting myself, Jenny and my stepson Steve as a cab driver. An 84-hour, 7-day working week didn't leave a lot of time for art but by working the 2pm to 2am shift I had the late mornings free. By 1980 we owned our own taxi, which I drove at night and rented out afternoons to free more time for drawing. |
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In 1981 I produced our first five prints. |
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In 1989 I experimentally added a connective scene to a Springer Spaniel head-study. The following year I repeated the experiment with a Border Collie and was filmed working on it at Crufts by BBC Television. These two studies began the Mike Sibley Collection of Limited Edition Prints. | |
Sell-out...In 1990 I was commissioned by the Irish Water Spaniel Association to produce a limited edition of 50 prints. The drawing took 117 hours to complete and the prints were launched on the IWSA's breed stand at Crufts at 8:30am........by 12 noon they were sold out!Very soon copies were changing hands at up ten times the original selling price of £45! |
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2001...my first websiteIn 2001 I built my first website - with a copy of "The Idiot's Guide to HTML 4". I was so taken by the flexibility offered by building from scratch and hand-coding that I've followed that route since then. A year later I began to learn JavaScript and the building of framed sites. Around that time I offered a single page of my site to other artists, as the "Guest Artists" page. It quickly grew until in 2002 I built my Starving-Artists.net site to split the two apart. Starving Artists now has in excess of 40,000 page hits a week and offers three services: subscription Gold and Silver galleries that form mini-websites for each artist, and the free galleries of Starving Artists 2. I still run Starving Artists personally, although Staving Artists 2 is an automated commercial program that artists can directly post their work to.In 2004 I began to design and run commercial websites for other artists and now have a stable of over 20 sites. [Sample site: www.DianeWrightFineArt.com]. I am currently rebuilding this SibleyFineArt website to take out of frames and modernise it to the current DHTML/CSS method. It will look and operate much as you see it now, but with enhanced search capabilities, indexing and functionality. |
In January 2005 I sat down to write and illustrate "Drawing From Line to Life". I worked on it full-time and finally completed all 288 pages in October of that year. In the meantime I had researched for a suitable publisher but most had a development time of 18 months - and a possible shelf-life of just 18 months too! So I decided to self-publish.
Quacks The Printers in York bent over backwards to help and they afforded me full access - even to sitting in with Andy the printer to oversee the quality. I can't praise them highly enough. |
I had so many requests to run workshops since the release of "Drawing from Line to Life" that I couldn't refuse. So I arranged my first workshop for June 2007, held in Sawley Village Hall, about three miles from the Fountains Abbey World Heritage site.
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Visit the Gallery of Unpublished Works for a potted history of Mike's non-commercial work
from the early beginnings to the present day. I've been trying to return to the countryside ever since I left Essex and finally made it in 1991. My wife Jenny and I now live on a four acre smallholding midway along a farm track, one mile from the village at either end. Here we are surrounded by our Shetland Ponies, sheep, dogs, cats, ducks and chickens, geese, goats and our horses, Badger and Tom, that Jenny uses for carriage driving. | ||
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Copyright - All content and images © M J Sibley 2003-2008 except Border Collie head-study © Berjaya. | ||
There are many animal artists around and it would not be fair to compare them but in MIKE SIBLEY we have something different. After leaving Leeds College of Art in 1970 he met his wife Jenny who bred and exhibited horses and dogs. It was this that turned his talents in that direction. A professional artist now for over twenty five years, he often spends over two hundred hours on a single drawing. Mike's work is special in its fine detail. The only tool for this is the pencil. He doesn't like colour, he says colour gets in the way.
I tried other media including Scraperboard (Scratchboard), but nothing transferred my thoughts to paper more accurately than pencil.
2005...my first book
Quacks are the second oldest printers in the world. The Harvard Press is the oldest but Quacks still operate from their original premises, which makes them the world's oldest in my eyes. Their oldest verifiable document (the sermon shown left) was printed in 1704!
2007...my first workshop
It was three-day workshop that took the attendees through the basics of negative drawing right through to a complex drawing of my own dog Buster in undergrowth (the illustration shown left is courtesy of Rob Bristow). As an added bonus over half the attendees were fellow members of my forum at 