On Dogs, Devotion & The Art of Looking | The Sunday Journal No.5

Some artists arrive at their subject by accident. Others seem to have known all along.

With Fiona Thomson, it’s dogs. Always dogs.

 

Italian Greyhound posing with an almost life-size portrait, 2026.

Not in the sentimental, twee sense of dog painting, but something much more interesting and often fun. Fiona has been drawing animals - particularly dogs - since before she can remember. As a child, unable to have one of her own, she filled her bedroom walls with drawings of every breed imaginable.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she eventually built an entire artistic practice around them.

 

Friday in the Sun, Fiona Thomson, 2026.

And not casually either. In her forties, Fiona returned to study at Gray's School of Art, completing a Master’s degree centred entirely around dog painting. Her thesis carried the wonderfully direct title: What is it to paint a dog? The dog image in contemporary art.

It sounds wonderfully niche and brilliant and forces one to think about the question and the more one does, the more interesting the question becomes.

Because Fiona isn’t really painting dogs so much as the experience of knowing them.

Spend time with her work and what emerges is personality first. Alertness. Habit. Familiarity. Dogs mid-thought, mid-pause, slightly distracted, quietly stubborn. Never overly posed. Never overly polished. Just carefully observed.

 

Fingal, Fiona Thomson, 2026.

She describes her process of painting dogs “as I find them,” which feels exactly right. Her own current pack - Friday, Meadow, Aria and Fingal - act as regular muses, apparently reluctantly but resigned to oblige. Which suits Fiona as she talks with deep respect for her dog's personhood and privacy.

 

Friday, Meadow, Aria and Fingal, 2026

There’s also a lightness to the way she talks about the work too. One of the paintings in her degree show, she cheerfully admitted, featured one of her dogs having a poop “but you won’t want to see that one!” Which perhaps tells you everything you need to know about her approach. No grand seriousness. Just attention, affection, and honesty.

 

The Red Jumper, Fiona Thomson, 2026.

It’s tempting to think of animal painting as straightforward, but Fiona’s work is more layered. Her brushwork - particularly of her birds we have on display - is energetic and immediate, often loose enough to feel impressionistic, but always anchored by an intuitive understanding of form.

 

Female Sparrow, Fiona Thomson, 2026.

Grey Heron near Garland, Fiona Thomson, 2026.

Lately, birds have begun appearing more frequently in the studio too, ahead of the Aberdeen Art Fair, though dogs continue to sit at the centre of everything. New ideas are emerging - figures walking dogs, shadow studies, slightly larger compositions exploring the strange companionship of walking alongside an animal.

 

Fiona Thomson Walking with Dogs, 2026.

And perhaps that’s the thing her work understands best. Dogs aren’t simply subjects. They’re companions, observers, extensions of routine and memory. That instinct comes from decades spent living with dogs - showing whippets at Crufts, competing in obedience, and painting them for over thirty years.

 

Wee Sleepy Whippet, Fiona Thomson, 2026.

Fiona has a habit of quietly dropping in details that deserve much more fanfare than they receive.  In 2011 she was invited by the then director of Bonhams to produce a solo exhibition in their galleries and her paintings are in the collections of celebrities and important people though, don’t ask us, Fiona keeps this a secret despite inquiries.

Fiona is a truly special artist and we are so glad to be showing her work in our Local Characters exhibition which runs to 30 May.

Next week, we reintroduce the incredibly charming Elizabeth Cameron to The Torrance Gallery family.

Until next Sunday,