Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a painter, successful and popular, he was rejected by the Slade School of Art in London

on the grounds that he had no talent whatsoever. Such criticism has never deterred the man who wanted to be a game warden but ended up painting the animals he long to protect.

His pictures of elephants, tigers and other wild animals are some of the best known in the world

and the huge sums of money they make has enabled their

creator to raise millions of pounds for wildlife conservation.

As far as the critics are concerned, he says, I'm the lowest form of animal life, but I laugh all the way to the bank he is

David Shepard you have David enjoyed the most phenomenal success and indeed still do

at the age of 67 do you still enjoy it I mean can you still lose yourself in the studio

I don't know about losing myself but I am the luckiest man alive I honestly am because I'm doing

something I love and above all else I'm managing to return something to wildlife and I like to think I'm still a small boy at heart too because life is so

fulfilling the older I get which is a rapidly increasing process frightening actually really

it just feels like that oh goodness the more exciting life becomes and I have to live every minute.

But you haven't only painted wild animals. You hate, don't you, being known as the man who paints elephants?

Well, it's nice to be known as anything anything I mean in a way in the artistic field

it's rather the equivalent of being on these tenders you know when you you have

done other things but that's all you're known for. But you've done aeroplanes

steam engines and Jesus Christ you've done the art royal.

Obviously what you like doing is anything that's big, dramatic.

Is that definition?

Yes, that's a lovely point actually, because when I painted the Queen Mother's portrait I just had finished painting the art royal and she said to me how do you manage to paint such a diversity of subjects? And it was very I was a tough spot here because I nearly put it the wrong way when I said there's no difference, ma'am,

...