“There’s An Elephant in Beaver Meadows” is a whimsical reimagining of natural history - one that playfully disrupts the expected with a quiet sense of wonder. Sparked by Craig Child’s book Atlas of a Lost World, which traces the final days of North America’s Ice Age giants, this piece wonders: what if those great creatures had never vanished? Set against the iconic silhouette of Long’s Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, a modern Asian elephant stands peacefully in Beaver Meadows, evoking the spirit of vanished mammoths and mastodons. It’s a gentle anachronism - a visual echo of ancient mammoth bones found near Aspen, reframed as a modern myth nestled within a beloved American landscape.
There’s An Elephant in Beaver Meadows
There’s An Elephant in Beaver Meadows
24” x 36”, Acrylic on Canvas
$870.00
As this was one of the first paintings I did, I initially had trouble converting the image inside my head onto the canvas, so I decided to to explore the composition, colors and style in Photoshop. I combined the image from the zoo with the image from the meadow, cranked up the saturation, and added a photographic vignette and yellowing to the edges to give it more of a vintage feel.