Painting / 2022
Life Itself
An animal and a forest become one living world. What seems like loss makes room for life.
- Artist
- Tess
- Year
- 2022
- Medium
- Mineral pigment & nikawa on wood board
- Dimensions
- 841 × 1189 mm
About this work
Inside the painting.
A pale deer emerges from a deep, celestial blue. Its head and antlers form a living scaffold where a micro-forest grows: fungi, shelf mushrooms and delicate sprouts spread across the animal’s face and branches.
The painting explores symbiosis, transformation and time. Decay becomes habitat, stillness becomes abundance, and what looks like loss becomes a new community of life.
There is tenderness in the deer’s gaze and quiet persistence in the small, patient growths. This is an offering to the slow work of nature, and to the strange beauty that arises when species share the same body and story.