Oversized Animal Paintings

Artist Comments
A family portrait style painting of artist Jessica JH Roller's four cats. She stylized the animals' features, focusing on each subject's unique patterns and m...

Artist Comments
"Considered symbols of luck, Koi fish are known for their tenacity to swim rushing streams and waterfalls until they reach their goal," says artist Candice Eisenfeld. "They are determined and they never give up. Symbolic in Buddhism, they represent courage and strength."

About the Artist
As an American exploring issues of identity, artist Candice Eisenfeld paints through the lens of the first American art movement, the Hudson River School. Rather than depicting a specific locale, Candice’s artwork evokes a sense of place. These "inner landscapes" are invented, and often reference photographs taken during travels in southern Appalachia and the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains. Whether real or imagined, her paintings are influenced by the Dutch Masters, Tonalists, and Chinese painting. Produced on a single wooden panel, the ethereal landscapes are often joined with segments of aqueous color fields which act as commentary for the landscapes, like the chorus in a Greek play. The crisp, hard edges separating the landscapes from the color fields command a sense of order in an otherwise fluid and painterly surface. With two or three sections of the panel competing for attention, the painting creates multiple focal points. Candice's art has been displayed in embassies in Namibia and Belarus, held in the collections of Norwest Bank and Northwest Airlines...

Artist Comments
Using thick brushstrokes and dripping paint, artist Alana Clumeck rendered this white stallion in a powerful and intuitive pose. ...

Artist Comments
Artist Emil Morhardt displays an impressionist portrait of three brown pelicans. The birds sun themselves in the Sea of Cortez against a subtle greenish-blue late afternoon sky. "I hadn't thought about pelicans having a 3D vision like hawks until I was looking over my photos and saw one of the birds staring straight at me," shares Emil. He references his photographs from a National Geographic Zodiac that the pelicans seemed curious about, allowing very close viewing.

About the Artist
Emil Morhardt is an acrylic painter from Santa Barbara, California who expresses his passion for birds through realistic acrylic paintings. He paints at home in a studio room that has large windows and a north-facing view of the mountains. He observes the animals from this window, watching roadrunners, foxes, bobcats, deer, and coyote run by. Surrounded by this wildlife, Emil paints bird portraits reminiscent of those by artist John James Audubon. He bases his paintings off hundreds of photographs he takes of birds in the wild and at wildlife recovery centers. Emil captures the freedom and inquisitiveness that birds display in the natural world. Before painting birds, he painted landscapes of San Francisco and the Eastern Sierra. Emil was raised in the high desert of California and learned to paint from his father, who was one of the early California watercolorists...

Artist Comments
Artist Rachel Srinivasan presents a surreal image of a white bison standing in the middle of 10 swords—nominative to its corresponding card from the tarot d...

Artist Comments
Artist Guigen Zha paints a white horse wading along blooming lotuses in realistic detail. It stands quietly in the shallow waters as the moonlight dreamily glows on the pond. "It seems to have forgotten where it came from and where it is going," says Guigen. He conveys the message of loneliness being a different kind of beauty.

About the Artist
From cross-cultural life experiences, artist Guigen Zha presents conceptual compositions of traditional Chinese art...

Artist Comments
A paper crane flies among a flock of birds against a dusky warm gradient. "The title of this work, 'This Is Not a Flock of Birds,' is a nod to Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte," shares artist Candice Eisenfeld. She takes pleasure in letting her viewers create their own meanings inspired by her work.

About the Artist
As an American exploring issues of identity, artist Candice Eisenfeld paints through the lens of the first American art movement, the Hudson River School. Rather than depicting a specific locale, Candice’s artwork evokes a sense of place. These "inner landscapes" are invented, and often reference photographs taken during travels in southern Appalachia and the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains. Whether real or imagined, her paintings are influenced by the Dutch Masters, Tonalists, and Chinese painting. Produced on a single wooden panel, the ethereal landscapes are often joined with segments of aqueous color fields which act as commentary for the landscapes, like the chorus in a Greek play. The crisp, hard edges separating the landscapes from the color fields command a sense of order in an otherwise fluid and painterly surface. With two or three sections of the panel competing for attention, the painting creates multiple focal points. Candice's art has been displayed in embassies in Namibia and Belarus, held in the collections of Norwest Bank and Northwest...

Artist Comments
This painting was inspired by the idea that we are shaped by outside forces, but remain unchanged, we persist in the face of adversity. It is what makes us human. My energetic oil paintings of stallions explore and illustrate movement through nature. This work represents an immigrant journey or strength and perseverance. I incorporate both contemporary (watercolor) and traditional (ink calligraphy) painting styles into this series.

About the Artist
Art has been with Shao Yuan Zhang for the majority of his extraordinary, and at times difficult, life journey. Raised in communist China...

Artist Comments
The bison and the beetle have a prehistoric elegance about them that I thought would compliment each other perfectly. Symbolically, both represent life and mortality, which has been on my mind lately. To Native Americans, bison are symbolic of sacred life and abundance. And in ancient greek mythology the beetle became revered as a symbol of rebirth and immortality -- its daily journey across the sky became an allegory of human life. The Wallpaper collection is a juxtaposition of masculine meets feminine. I wanted to create a unique series that stands apart from traditional nature paintings, where the wild and somewhat prehistoric aspects of my animals featured contrast against their delicate backdrops. In addition to this, many of my paintings are created with a little bit of underlying symbolism usually sparked from a world event or life moment that I am experiencing. I concentrate on this theme as a therapeutic mantra throughout the creation of the painting. For each painting, different techniques and layers of design are implemented when creating the wall paper effect. To keep the patterns consistent I create a stencil to outline the shapes of my hummingbirds, bugs and fish, and then I hand paint each shape individually. In the areas where I wanted a little more chaos, I would forgo the stencil and eyeball each design. My animals are always painted first, and then I layout the design around them.

About the Artist
Australian-born Alana Clumeck...

Artist Comments
Three black crows rest on a winter tree, content in each other's company. A crescent moon hangs in the teal night sky, and an ethereal glow suffuses throughout. Artist Sally Adams...