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Lion follows internationally collected artist Mark Adlington's three-year mission to find lions in six very different habitats across East and Southern Africa. The resulting body of stunning paintings, drawings and sketchbooks represent the countless months of patient waiting, observation and interaction which have given the artist a unique insight into this most beautiful of big cats. With written contributions from frontline lion conservationists, without whose help and support the project would have been impossible, this is a book which will delight and inform art and nature lovers alike. Since the appearance of the Hohlenstein-Stadel Lion Man, the first ever human artwork, some 40,000 years ago, lions in art have surrounded us as symbols of royalty, power, evangelists, constellations and even the sun. Where lions are increasingly not, is living on this earth in the wild. While it may seem ambitious to take on such iconic subject matter, Adlington wanted to go back to source and create work that reflected the reality of the charismatic duality of this rapidly disappearing apex predator.
Mark Adlington has always travelled extensively in search of wildlife; his principal obsession since early childhood. He works extensively on site before returning to the studio to recreate the immediacy of his responses to the animals, using various and often mixed media. Mark exhibits regularly both in London and abroad and is represented by the John Martin Gallery in Mayfair, London, and by the Bridgeman Art Library, which whom he is one of their most downloaded contemporary artists. Mark Adlington's fluid watercolour otters were used to illustrate Unicorn's bestselling centenary edition of Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water, while in Painting the Ice Bear, his long-held ambition to visit the arctic is documented in a lavishly illustrated book of polar bear studies and paintings.
