The Herdsman - Curtis Hylton
Cattles and Apples
Curtis Hylton is an artist based in the UK, skilled in creating large-scale murals using spray paint. His trademark style of fusing flora and fauna can be seen across the UK, Europe and rest of the world.
He aims to create artwork that highlights biodiversity and inspires cultural change in the way we engage with nature: "I was fortunate to spend my childhood before the digital era in an area with copious amounts of woodland and other ecosystems. Growing up in these surroundings and having family and friends around me with a shared love of this environment grounded my love of nature. This love, wonder and curiosity would become the inspiration that fuels my work today."
Hylton celebrates the strong farming heritage in Herefordshire in his artwork and the site of the old cattle market originally located next to The Herdsman pub. For hundreds of years up to 2013, Hereford life revolved around its livestock market. Traditionally on market day, people would travel here from far and wide to buy and sell animals; farmers would drive their flocks through the city streets to market in celebration of a vibrant agricultural community.
Working at scale on the side of The Herdsman, he has brought some of that heritage back into the city with a new contemporary twist: "I mainly focus on fauna and flora, staying native to the area where I'm painting, which is where the Herefordshire cattle came from. It's a local animal known and celebrated in the area, so I wanted to create a massive version. It was quite an interesting wall with it having two sides: the main area and the return. The real hurdle was to get it to work around the signage and for it to look impactful from both angles. It's been fun playing around with the composition and getting it right."
He concludes: "I believe that by injecting some colour to an area abundant with blank walls will not only lift the area, but also inspire and implement cultural change to the way in which we engage with nature."
The artwork is no. 7 on the Hereford Public Art Trail.