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Despite selling drawings and paintings regularly as a teenager growing up in Saddleworth, near Oldham, Mike Haken has only been working as a professional artist since September 2006. After studying Architecture at Cambridge and Sheffield Universities, he worked in architectural conservation, sales, insurance, and has run a variety of businesses as diverse as equestrian supplies and dealing in antique aircraft spares.
He describes those 25 years as being like trying to find his way home from a foreign country without a map. Now, finally, he knows where is going!
After a little over two years, his reputation is growing fast as a specialist horse portrait artist, resulting in commissions for some of the UK’s leading riders. To achieve both subtlety and depth of tone, along with accuracy of detail, he uses a combination of soft pastels hand-made from the finest natural pigments in Northunberland and pastel pencils from the Lake District, as well as slightly harder pastel pencils imported from Germany for the finest details. Top quality materials are only part of the story, as he only rarely works from photographs provided by the client, believing that it is important to visit each animal and take his own photographs and notes, thus ensuring that he can portray each animal’s unique character.
Apart from his art, Mike’s passion is for heavy horses, such as the Shire horses he is pictured with here. He believes that the empathy and understanding of horses he has gained through working with them helps him to catch each individual’s spirit in a portrait.
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