Evan Lovejoy’s paintings are inspired by both the artist’s love of the natural world and his anguish due to its destruction. Our complicated relationship with animals is shown through the artist’s varying ways of depicting them. Within the same work, a beast moves between a sense of realism, cartoonish rendering, and a more pop-surrealist sensibility.
“I have an intense fascination with the way in which human beings perceive animals,” the artist says. “Their forms are hijacked, and they become surrogates for our ideas, stories, and symbols, despite their inherent isolation from the human thought process. The true animal becomes more and more separated from our consciousness and is replaced by something artificial: a chimera of images and ideas created through a maelstrom of cartoons, fables, wildlife documentaries, museum dioramas, conservationist policies, and zoos. The animals I paint are not representations of their real life counterparts, but instead display a form that is entirely an artifice.”
Find more on Lovejoy’s site.
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