Flora & Fauna

Nature; is it a place or a state of mind? That’s what artists have long wondered as they strove to capture the jewel-eyed tiger or the mouldering fig.

Perhaps in response to our increasingly urbanised world and treadmill lifestyles contemporary artists are keen to plunder the wild places and charm the birds onto their canvas for aesthetic and emotional effect.

Images of the natural world have been recognised as providing comfort and calm to the viewer; think of the picture books of animals you learnt the alphabet from, or those precision-perfect landscapes of deer parks and oak trees. Now forget all that and think about the rough brutality of a buffalo hunt depicted on a stone-age cave or the blatant sexuality of a Georgia O’Keefe lily. Contemporary artists want to charge across the plains of your imagination with their own depictions of the natural world; both nice and nasty, so click this way for where the wild things are.