Self-taught painter Josie Morway’s (previously featured here) hyperrealistic oil paintings are intended to be both reverent and darkly comic. Exploring the simultaneous fragility and fortitude of the natural world, she envisions the sanctity of wildlife and wilderness in the face of human degradation and seeks to challenge the assumptions and projections we bring to our interactions with the wild. She elaborates:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what we humans demand of — and project onto — the wild. Not only in the obvious sense of callous disrespect, the way we continue to relentlessly trample and deplete nature. Even those of us with the most reverence for nature demand so much from it… we expect it to inspire us, calm us, to symbolize us, to purify us and even to cure us. It’s a lot to ask.  I hope that my pieces draw people in with recognizable expression and emotion, invite you to empathize and care about my subjects, but then also disorient a bit and ask you to reconsider your first readings. I want to leave nature a bit impenetrable in order to remind us (myself included) that it’s not all about us.”

See more from Josie Morway below!