Drawn to natural history from childhood, Matt Underwood’s work is a lifelong conversation with the living world. Trained in wildlife illustration at Carmarthenshire College of Art — where he completed his HND with distinction — he began his career painting landscape and still life before returning, in recent years, to the subjects that first captured his imagination. Working in collage, mixed media, woodblock printing, and oil, he seeks to bottle that particular feeling of encountering something in nature for the very first time: a bird in an unexpected place, or a fleeting glimpse caught before a blink. His work has been shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Royal West of England Academy, the Mall Gallery and the Medici Gallery, among others, and has travelled as far as Amsterdam and New York. At the 2002 Society of Wildlife Artists exhibition he was awarded the RSPB Fine Art Award.