She Traded Stevie for Standard Poodles
An R&B Singer’s Second Act, in Oils

By Tara Kelly
Photos By Rana Faure

Alexis England, an accomplished painter and animal portraitist, lives and works surrounded by some of her favorite subjects. “We have two donkeys, two goats, and two dogs,” England says. “My studio looks out onto my animals.”
She and her husband, Scott Small, a neuroscientist and the director of the Alzheimer’s Research Center at Columbia Presbyterian in New York, moved up from the city in 1996. “We fell in love with Dutchess County,” she says. After visiting friends in Millbrook, they started looking for houses in the area. “This was the first property we saw. The view was ridiculous. The miles of sky, the cornfields, the old beams in the house. It just brought my childhood spent in England back to me.” Located outside the village of Millerton, they jokingly call their place Small Farm.

England enrolled in the York Academy of Art in York, Pennsylvania, after high school, but she put her art career on hold to pursue singing when she discovered she couldn’t make time for both. Her voice led her to Los Angeles, where she sang R&B with Mavis Staples, Lionel Richie, and Stevie Wonder, among others. It’s also where she met her husband, who was doing his internship residency year at UCLA.
She never completely gave up painting. “When I was in LA I would paint in the kitchen.” Back in New York, she enrolled part-time at the Art Students League while continuing to perform in clubs. Slowly, they started spending more time in the country, and England turned the barn into her studio.
England divides her art into categories, her “personal work” and animal portraiture. Her deep connection to nature is what informs her paintings. “I’m so completely free and unhinged when I do my own work. Form, shape, and movement come first for me.” Abstractions of nature. A mass of broken flowers. Hooves flying across the canvas. Her paintings are expressive but with elements of the familiar.
“The animal portraiture came into play when someone wanted to buy a painting I’d done of my dog, Fenn. I said, ‘Well no, but I could paint your dog.'” Since then, she’s had no shortage of commissions. Most of her business is by word of mouth and through her website. Her portraits are not limited to dogs. She’s painted horses, cats, rabbits, even the occasional chicken or pig.

“I like to meet the animal and spend time with them, and take my own photographs, but sometimes that’s not possible, because it’s long distance, or the animal has passed, and then the client will share their own photos.” These photos become the jumping-off point. The animal portraits are classic, but with her own particular style.
“My full-time return to art coincided perfectly with my move to the country. I had wanted to settle down, and here I am, in Dutchess County, one of the most beautiful spots in the world. I’m interested in beauty. It’s really joyous to be able to do what I love.”
–alexisenglandportraits.com
–alexisenglandart.com