My artwork includes includes a variety of perspectives about animals and environments: their beautiful and varied shapes and patterns, animal behavior and relationships, the concepts of predator and prey, and how animals manage to survive both in and outside of human-created enclosures. I paint both captive and wild species, to study them and challenge my own ideas about nature. Unacknowledged as part of nature, humans tend to project themselves and their desired or imagined characteristics and emotions onto animals. Preserved in zoos, common to both rural and urban environments, the animals are considered by visitors to be either extraordinary, as pests or even despised rather than admirable, based on human perceptions and imaginings of the value of different species.