Gill Oliver talks to an acclaimed Oxfordshire artist known for his work with animals

All roads lead back to India, in the case of Marcus Hodge. The artist, whose style is described as “energetic and impressionist”, has always been inspired by the exotic.

He has become well known for his equestrian paintings and has followed the ancient horse fairs in Northern India for almost 20 years.

Those images, which capture the beauty and heat of the moment on oil and canvas, seem a long way from his home village of Appleton.

The connection with India goes back a long way, as his grandparents ran a flying school north of Delhi and his uncle was born there.

He travels to Rajasthan regularly and spent a month at the beginning of 2013 there, capturing the activity at the ancient horse fairs with startlingly life-like paintings of horses, cattle men and shepherds.

And he has even been learning Hindi, as part of his long-term love affair with India.

Travelling is part of the job he loves and he spent two “really long stints” in New York last year, painting portraits, including one for the Union club, Manhattan’s most exclusive gentleman’s club.

He has also travelled to Dubai three times in the past 12 months, including painting at the royal stables.

“It’s the most beautiful place,” he says of Dubai. “It’s really exciting and there is so much incredible architecture springing up everywhere.”

The link to Dubai’s royal stables has an Indian connection, as it came about via a trainer he knew from Rajasthan.

There, he has painted young jockeys and stable lads, many of them from India and Pakistan.

He likes the idea of immortalising in oils those he describes as “unsung people who just get on with the hard graft”, including cattle men and shepherds of northern India and Spain.

This month he is off to his small studio in Monaco, a yearly ritual, where he relishes the change of scene and pace.

For this trip, he has permission to go behind the scenes of the Monte Carlo Circus for three weeks and paint dogs, horses and whatever else catches his artist’s eye.

Another favourite destination for artistic inspiration is the Scottish Highlands and one of his works includes a landscape portrait of deer stalking at Balmoral, commissioned by the Scots Guards.

Despite the jet-setting, he finds time to work in the volunteer-run village shop in Appleton for two hours each week.

Home is shared with wife Alix, who is head of department at a special needs school near Abingdon and their children Clara, 16, and Freddie, 14.

The 47-year-old grew up in Sussex and went to boarding school and studied for a degree in economics, before realising his passion was painting.

On the advice of his father, Spencer Hodge, a respected portrait painter, he spent five years studying old master techniques at the prestigious Escuela Libre Del Mediterraneo art school in Mallorca, where his tutors included one of Spain’s leading portrait painters, Joaquin Llado.

Learning to paint animals, particularly horses, is acknowledged as being particularly difficult, because of the way their muscles are so close to the surface.

He said: “There is no fudging the issue. If you don’t know what is going on underneath the surface, it shows in the finished work.

“You need to have that knowledge and I still spend time looking at anatomical drawings.”

On returning to England in 1996, he worked from a studio on Folly Bridge in Oxford.

A year later, he was picked out as on an ‘A-list’ of portrait painters by glossy society magazine Harpers & Queen.

The accolade resulted in a number of commissions and word of mouth has kept it going ever since.

One of his most prestigious recent commissions has been to paint Lord Tebbit. Part of a series of paintings, it is for the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre’s Botnar Research Centre Appeal, whose board of trustees is chaired by the former Conservative cabinet minister.

It might have been a prickly encounter, after all Norman Tebbit, regarded as the ‘enforcer’ of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, was constantly portrayed as a ‘bovver boy’ in the 1980s satirical TV series Spitting Image.

But either the octogenarian has mellowed, or that idea of him was always false, according to Mr Hodge.

He said: “He’s really, really charming when you meet him, very relaxed and easy going.

“If I’m honest, my main worry was that he might find me rather dull company.”

Other portraits he has painted include one of Richard Dick, head of Jericho-based W Lucy and a former High Sheriff of Oxfordshire, and a whole slew of top military personnel.

Portrait painting means forging a connection with his subject, he says, and “trying to find common ground and making the effort to get to know the person”.

Now, though, he is “stepping back” from portraits, explaining “I’ve been doing it full time for nearly 20 years now and would like to do less.”

A major exhibition this year in London will concentrate instead on his dramatic equestrian and landscape work.

He also wants to spend more time sculpting in bronze.

“The moment I started sculpting, I realised how little I know,” he said.

“But then I think most artists would say the same. You look at your work and think ‘I could have done that better’.”