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Iwan and Manuela Wirth with two dogs in the woods Exterior of the Fife Arms hotel looking down on to the Clunie Water The entrance to the garden from the Fife Arms hotel A river winds through a rocky shoreline surrounded by dense green trees, with mountains rising in the background under a partly cloudy sky.
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A painting by Lucien Freud hung on an orange wall in the hotel reception The Richard Jackson 'Red Deer Chandelier' on view in the hotel reception A landscape drawing by James Prosek who was one of our first artists in residence Circle Of Pieter Brueghel The Younger (1564 – 1636) in painted room with tables and chairs
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A stuffed flying stag hung above the bar of the pub with bottles of spirits and a wall of antlers in the background.

The Origins Of The Flying Stag

A Hybrid Organism

An illustration of a mythical stag with wings, surrounded by numbered birds and butterflies, displayed on a wall decorated with bare branches.

A visitor who played an important part in the evolution of the hotel, particularly the pub, was the American artist, writer and naturalist James Prosek, who passed two months in Braemar in the summer of 2017. Prosek spent some time walking, foraging and heading out into the hills with the local gamekeeper before starting work on a substantial series of drawings, watercolours and paintings capturing the landscape and its wildlife, but also exploring the theme of heraldry.

Pub Mascot

The two interests combined in his painting Flying Stag, Cairngorms, Scotland, depicting an animal with the wings of a ptarmigan and the body of a stag. This was then adopted as the name and mascot of the hotel’s pub.

‘What they are creating is a wonderful hybrid organism, not simply a gallery but a space where you live and eat, which brings together human creativity and the local ecology.’

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The Flying Stag above the bar
The lively interior of the Flying Stag pub with people seated at wooden tables and at the bar, surrounded by framed artwork, warm lighting, and large decorative chandeliers.
Groups of people seated at wooden tables, talking and drinking under warm lighting and a large spherical chandelier in the Flying Stag pub.
Empty interior of the Flying Stag pub with wooden tables and chairs, large spherical chandeliers, art filled walls, and warm natural light filling the room.

The Creative Process

‘While I was there, Iwan and Manuela came up to the gardener’s cottage, where I was staying, to see what I had been up to and I showed them a few sketches of the coat of arms with the flying stag and they were very positive.

Over the next couple of months, it actually became a real thing and I worked with Ben Carter – a master hunter and forager – on putting together the taxidermied flying stag in the bar. It is a great privilege to have my work in such a gorgeous setting where people might stop and appreciate it. That’s the hope.’

'The hybrid stag symbolised, for me, the efforts of Iwan and Manuela Wirth to marry hospitality with art.'
The Flying Stag pub

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