Western Art Collector – August 2019

COLLECTOR’S FOCUS

WINGED CREATURES: ART OF THE BIRD

Ewoud de Groot grew up and lives on the
coast of the Netherlands. He began drawing
native birds as a young boy and, for a time,
worked as a graphic designer illustrating
books on nature. In 1999 he turned to painting
full time. De Groot’s paintings are instantly
recognized as his. Accurately rendered birds
often fly directly at the viewer from an abstract

field as in Great Gray Taking Off. 

“What I’m seeking is the mythical qualities

in nature,” he says. “Although I consider myself

a figurative painter, I always try to find that

essential balance and tension between the

more abstract background and the realism of

the subject[s]. In a way you could say that

I am on the frontier between figurative and non-

figurative, or the traditional and the modern.”

Josie Morway takes the mythical qualities

of nature into the surreal in her precisely

rendered depictions of flora and fauna

in complex relationships that echo the

complexity of their interdependence in real

life. Symbiotes I illustrates the complicated

connections as a thrasher and a hawk are

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