Living in a high-rise apartment or a house with a small yard comes with the disadvantage of not having access to garden space. Fortunately, fine wallpaper manufacturer Astek has a way to bring beautiful blooms indoors. The company’s collection of dreamy floral mural designs called Eterna Nouveau reinterprets the Art Nouveau movement of the early 20th century, which historically flourished in Europe and emphasized nature-inspired motifs like flowers and birds.

Eterna Nouveau’s arching, sinuous stems and leaves nod to its namesake style’s characteristic “whiplash” lines. “Aquavita,” for example, features lilies and other water plants and illustrates life both above and below the surface. And “Carnivoria” celebrates more unusual plants, like Venus flytraps. A variety of colorways emphasizes the designs’ bold forms and delicate metallic outlines.

The motifs were first created by hand, then digitized so that they can be sized up or down to fit custom spaces. Printed to order, the colors and shapes can even be customized for special projects. See more on Astek’s Instagram.

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For Olaf Hajek, difference isn’t about opposition but rather about identifying connections. The Berlin-based illustrator renders dense, uncanny compositions that nod to Surrealist icons like Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Nature and culture entwine, and magic and mystery veil each scene. These dreamlike moments of intrigue ask the viewer to suspend preconceived notions and instead, enjoy the allure of the ambiguous.

Hajek is an avid traveler and cultural consumer, offering him a vast repository of images from a variety of sources and locales. Folklore, vernacular traditions, spiritual practices, and natural motifs blend into a distinguishable aesthetic. “What interests me is not so much their differences, but the connections between them—the possibility of developing a universal visual language by bringing diverse influences together. This blending becomes a way of transcending cultural boundaries and revealing something shared and timeless,” he says.

Ambiguity is a central point of Hajek’s practice, emerging technically through superimposed florals and figures, dramatic shifts in scale, and a tension between decay and renewal. Gender and conceptions of masculinity, in particular, are depicted with a sense of softness and fluidity, particularly through symbolic, botanical motifs in vibrant color.

Hajek works in parallel, if not complementary, practices, sketching and painting on paper in a looser, more reflexive manner. “I embrace the unexpected—how colors interact, how forms dissolve into one another, and how compositions evolve organically. Especially in works on paper, intuition plays a central role; they feel more immediate, almost like a direct dialogue with the moment,” he tells Colossal.

Shifting to the canvas, though, requires a clearer vision, and the two approaches are an essential pairing in his practice. “They are part of the same artistic process, which constantly moves between intention and surprise, between structure and freedom,” he says.

Hajek is participating in several upcoming exhibitions, including a group show at Feinkunst Krüger in Hamburg and two solo presentations at Museum Franz Xaver Stahl in Erding and Kaplan Projects in Palma de Mallorca. Until then, find more of his work on Instagram.

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For the past year, Mary Maka has lived in Sri Lanka, where the tropical flora and fauna have inspired her to continue her vibrant Endless Forest series. In the artist’s characteristically smooth, cartoonish, vivid illustrations, creatures peer out from between giant leaves, cling to palm trees, and nap on long branches. She has also begun incorporating animated elements that enliven the scenes.

“At the same time, living on the island has revealed the fragility of nature’s balance,” Maka tells Colossal. “The lush tropical landscape conceals the vulnerability of the ecosystem and the delicate relationship between humans and the natural world.” Through these observations, both beauty and fragility have become key themes in her recent works.

Find more on Maka’s Behance and Instagram, and support her work on Patreon.

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Even though most of us are eager for spring here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re happy to linger in winter a little while longer to take in Robinsson Cravents’ new project. The Colombia-based designer and illustrator recently released a pair of hand-drawn digital landscapes that take a bird’s-eye view of Yosemite National Park. Starting with a wide aerial shot of coniferous trees, the films then journey down a stream up to a waterfall, capturing the majestic scenery with grainy, tactile detail.

The project is a commission for Yosemite, a venture capital firm helmed by Reed Jobs that funds startups and researchers working on cancer treatments. For the creative direction, Cravents collaborated with LoveFrom, a collective helmed by Apple alum Jony Ive.

Winter and autumn are available for viewing, but the spring and summer films have yet to be released. Keep an eye on Crevants’ Behance and Instagram for the remaining seasons.

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Hieu Chau compares his dense, dynamic compositions to his always active mind. Playing with scale and proportion, the Vietnamese artist renders surreal scenes in which flora and fauna converge and figures interact with the outside world as if in a dream. Chau, who was trained as a painter, now works digitally, although his pieces capture the grainy textures and gestures of a physical medium.

The artist recently published a book collecting his projects from the last decade, and you can find explore an archive of these pieces on Instagram.

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Decades before the advent of photography, when European scientists and explorers were undertaking global expeditions and collecting flora and fauna from around the world, art and science converged in fields of medicine, anthropology, and natural history. During the Enlightenment, artists like Elizabeth Blackwell, John Gould, and Elizabeth Gould—among many, many others—documented botanicals, avians, insects, marine species, and more, many of which were published in hefty volumes and archived in museum collections.

Sarah Stone (1759-1844) was a British illustrator and the daughter of a fan painter, whose rich depictions of birds and artifacts highlight a singular talent during an era when women weren’t even permitted to be members of London’s prestigious Royal Academy. Nevertheless, she was invited to exhibit four drawings as an “Honorary Exhibitor” when she was 21.

In the 1770s, British businessman and collector Sir Ashton Lever commissioned Stone to paint items in his museum chock-full of natural and ethnographic objects he called the Holophusikon, also known as the Lever Museum. Stone painted objects at Lever’s Holophusikon well into the 1780s, creating a visual chronicle of objects and fauna acquired from all over the world.

Aristocratic private museums were a phenomenon of the Enlightenment, when Britain enjoyed wealth, prestige, and influence, much of which was derived from other parts of the empire and the transatlantic slave trade. Many of today’s institutions, such as the British Museum, began with individuals’ private collections.

Nearly two dozen of the artist’s paintings are currently on view in Sarah Stone’s Unseen World: A Rare Collection of 18th Century Ornithological Watercolours as part of the Master Drawings New York art fair. Surveying a wide range of incredible birds, from the Bornean peacock pheasant to the distinctive orange-and-black rufous treepie.

The exhibition shares its title with a book co-authored by Errol Fuller and art dealer Craig Finch of Finch & Co., which presents the paintings this month. “Like many women painters of her time, Stone produced exquisite watercolour landscapes,” says a statement. “However, she was exceptional in her commercial success, with her paintings sought after by connoisseurs and collectors. In an era when women’s contributions were often overlooked, Stone defied the norm and stood out as a prominent figure.”

Sarah Stone’s Unseen World continues at Peter Harrington Rare Books in Manhattan through February 7.

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In 1835, a tortoiseshell cat measuring more than three feet long was enough to warrant a small advertisement in a British newspaper that as “the greatest curiosity ever shown to the public,” it could be viewed at the Ship Tavern in London. Surely a pint of ale was the informal fee to view this extraordinary animal.

It was during the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe that cats became increasingly recognized as worthy pets, beyond their role as mousers. Breweries and distilleries often still “employ” a cat or two to keep the rodents out of the grain. From supernatural kaibyō in Japanese folklore to felines’ divine status in ancient Egypt, the animals have had an indelible influence on mythology, history, and our daily lives for a very long time.

Forthcoming from Phaidon, the book Cat celebrates, well, exactly what you’d expect. From contemporary sculpture and illustrations to early photography and internet memes, the volume runs the gamut of feline personalities and depictions in art throughout the millennia. Yet no matter how diverse the portrayals or how long ago they were created, the creatures’ expressiveness—even ridiculousness—is universally relatable.

Cat surveys an immense range of mediums and eras, from medieval illuminated manuscripts to modern street art. Colossal readers may be familiar with artists like Xuan Loc Xuan, Lee Sangsoo, and Utagawa Hiroshige, among many others, whose multimedia explorations of feline nature fill the playful tome.

Slated for release on February 11, Cat is available for pre-order in the Colossal Shop.

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Playful idiosyncrasies and bouts of whimsy bubble up in the works of Yuko Shimizu. Depicting swimmers in vintage bathing suits as they dive after giant fish or diminutive figures wading through tulips twice as tall as they are, the Brooklyn-based artist’s playful illustrations evoke folktales and dreams, characterized by enigmatic narratives and determined action.

Shimizu has previously taught at Quarantine, a unique residency off the coast of Menorca, Spain, where artists are invited to disconnect from tech in order to reconnect with the creative process and one another. She’s currently working on a number of book illustration projects and preparing to return to Quarantine for another stint this spring. Find more on her Instagram.

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Humans have been creating pigments for thousands of years, foraging for local materials that could be ground or extracted to create colors. The 17,000-year-old cave art in Lascaux, France, for example, is a mindbogglingly early example of human ingenuity when it comes to processing elements of nature, such as minerals, ochres, and shells, to create different hues.

As time went on, people continued to experiment and develop new dyes and paints, some of which were poisonous. Minerals sometimes contain toxic elements, so red often contained lead, cinnabar had mercury, and orpiment arsenic. Aristocratic Romans even used a face-lightening compound containing lead, and their blush tended to feature crushed mulberries or red vermillion, a.k.a. powdered cinnabar.

In the medieval period, plants also became more valuable as a means of producing pigments, especially as trade routes expanded and botanicals from different parts of the world could be obtained or seeded in gardens. The colors we see in illuminated manuscripts and associate with dyed fabrics became increasingly desirable during this era.

Blue and purple can be extracted from woad, ivy, and Portuguese laurel, while golden hues can be made from cornflower, crocus, myrrh, turmeric, and more. In the forthcoming Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree: Historical Recipes for Natural Inks, Paints, and Dyes, author Nabil Ali celebrates this long legacy of botanical pigments and the craft traditions that used them, with an emphasis on the Middle Ages.

Ali compiles recipes from as far back as the 3rd century B.C.E. to as recently as the last couple of decades, reproducing a wide range of scientific and artistic illustrations of a wide range of specimens from manuscripts and encyclopedic volumes. Published by Princeton University Press, Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree takes its title from an ink recipe made from using bark extracted from a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree, in which the brown ingredients transform into a rich yellow-gold.

The book is slated for release in April, and you can pre-order your copy in the Colossal Shop. You might also enjoy The Mushroom Color Atlas.

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Animals, architecture, celestial phenomena and more merge with vibrant patterns in kaleidoscopic illustrations. YoAz focuses on repetition, color relationships, and maximalist compositions in his digital works. Drawing on the legacy of 1960s psychedelic posters and evocative of circus imagery and M.C. Escher, the artist emphasizes color, symmetry, and line through motifs that often include faces, flowers, eyes, suns, birds, and more.

Keep up with the artist’s work on Behance and Instagram, and purchase prints and stickers in the artist’s Redbubble shop.

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