A new body of work from artist Josie Morway (previously featured here). Offering a mix of hyper-realistic detail and chemically bright colours, Morway’s wildlife paintings convey both beauty and brutality. While initially striking — enticing viewers to take a closer look — the images also carrying a distinct unnaturalness and subtle critique of such (human) encroachment and intrusion. As Moray explains:

“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.”

Ultimately leaning more toward the surreal than the real, Moray’s paintings disrupt our traditionally comfortable positions as viewers and creators of art as they work to leave us more unsettled than satisfied: “I want to leave nature a bit impenetrable in order to remind us (myself included) that it’s not all about us.”

See more humbling images below.