Home | Tell Hicks

This site is to showcase the wonderful and captivating art of Tell Hicks

The Artist

About Tell Hicks

Tell Hicks was born in London in 1951 and spent much of his early childhood seeking out what little wildlife the city streets could offer a young boy with a love for natural history. From an early age he had a passion for animals and wildlife, fascinated by whatever creature he could find crawling, slithering, or flying nearby.

When his family moved to Buckinghamshire he was in his element and spent every spare moment wandering the fields and woodlands of Burnham Beeches. This woodland of special scientific interest soon became his playground, his classroom, and his inspiration. On one such ramble, at the age of ten, he discovered a colony of European Vipers and his fate was sealed. From that day onwards reptiles were no longer just an interest; they became a life’s work.

As a teenager, he worked in British zoos, looking after various animals and also training and flying birds of prey. It was at Drayton Manor Zoo in the late 1960’s that he colleagues Tony Phelps, John Foden and David Turnbull, founded the International Herpetological Society, and in the 2000’s served as its President.

Tell Hicks traveled the world, studying and painting reptiles and other wildlife. To achieve the realist representation that he was after, he developed new techniques in egg-temper painting, a very ancient medium, which requires much discipline in its application. In recent years he successfully employed these techniques with oil paints on canvas.

Despite being completely self-taught, he won many major awards within the screen-printing industry, for his t-shirt designs. He was runner-up ‘Wildlife Artist of the Year’ in the UK and produced work for Eco and other leading t-shirt printers, in the USA and Britain.

Tell also gave talks to wildlife groups and natural history societies, about his artwork, field trips and travels to such places as Turkey, Cyprus, Canary Islands, Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, the Amazon, the Galapagos Islands and the USA.

In 2018 at the age of 67, everything changed when in a freak accident, Tell broke his neck leaving him paralyzed from the upper chest down. Despite having very limited use of his arms and hands, he was determined to paint again, and the ability to continue his passion remained one of his main goals during his hospital rehabilitation.
With this determination, and with the help from his family, physiotherapists and friends, he started to produce his unique, and highly detailed paintings again.