Here are some artworks of wildlife living in the little details of urban decay that flourish in our towns and cities. I create these from macro photographs of weathered urban surfaces such as cracked paintwork and rusty metal that I find all around our urban spaces. I then use Photoshop to add the wildlife.
This weathering is such a natural force almost as if nature is reclaiming from us what once was hers, and in my mind these artworks are a way of helping that process along. Re-wilding our urban corners.
Ancient Forest Bear - the northern woods feel like my ancestral home, a place that draws me in, and I love the feeling of the possibilities it offers, the chance of a surprise encounter at any moment, particularly in any region that has retained a healthy fauna all the way up to the top predators. I have never seen a bear in the wild but their presence alone changes our relationship to a landscape and one day I hope to get a glimpse like this one...created from the moldy stains on a damp old wall.
Bat Cavern - I spent five years doing bat research in Thailand and they are animals close to my heart. This image made from a photo of cracked, flaky paintwork gives a hint of the confusion of going into a bat cave and accidentally disturbing lots of bats into flight. My little joke here, in recognition of the bats upsidedown lifestyle, is that the background photo is upsidedown as you can just about see from the shadows along the edges of the paint flakes.
Beach Titans - the stark world of a volcanic sands beach somewhere around the Antarctic with a herd of elephant seals dominated by a pair of bulls battling it out. I liked the patterning on this worn old wall but its lack of colour could only really be turned into a harsh environment like this.
Bobcat Godzilla - it's hard for us to imagine what it must be like to constantly live with the presence of enormous predatory animals many times our size where their threat is a constant part of life. We do imagine it in movies but for animals like mice it's a daily reality. I think there are 37 mice in this picture dashing around that flaky paint on rusty metal in panic.
Caribou Drift - a large dispersed herd of caribou/reindeer slowly wandering over a tundra landscape that was suggested to me by the fine cracked networks within this heavily weathered paintwork. There are 36 caribou in this image plus a wolf, a wolverine, an arctic fox and a man. All the caribou are heading in the same direction so I guess they are migrating.
Cracked Rock Coyotes - I played around with the colours a lot here. It's actually two background photos both simplified to a single tone but then blended together for this two-tone effect. Can you spot all three of this coyote's cubs?
