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Artist Creates Multi-Layer Watercolor Paintings of Enchanting Forests

By Emma Taggart on October 13, 2017

Demi-Spheres by Allison May Kiphuth

Artist and nature lover Allison May Kiphuth crafts stunning watercolor landscapes that illustrate her natural surroundings. Working along Maine and New Hampshire’s blustery coastlines, she takes photographs from her woodland adventures and re-creates them in a multi-layered spherical form. The stunning series—entitled Demi-Spheres—was inspired by a stand-out line from Terry Tempest Williams' The hour of land: a personal topography of America's national parks, which states, “we learned early on that we live by wild mercy.”

Each hand-cut layer details the depth of the forest, moving from the background, to the mid-ground and then foreground in a gradation of green hues, from translucent to vivid. They are aligned on top of each other, captivating the enchanting, natural environment in an arc-shaped three-dimensional scene.

Kiphuth’s previous work includes tiny mixed media diorama woodland worlds, housed in antique boxes, and a series of beautiful watercolor and ink studies of items found in nature—such as feathers, leaves, and rocks—entitled Bioconstellation. Both of these projects naturally led her to create the Demi-Sphere series, which combines her three-dimensional sculptural work with her hand-painted illustrations. Kiphuth explains, “The series is a bit of an experiment, falling somewhere between my boxed scenes and Bioconstellation, or, as I've been thinking of them, uncontained dioramas.”

The Demi-Sphere series was previously available to purchase from Enormous Tiny Art, but sold out fast. Keep a lookout on Kiphuth’s Instagram for updates on new work, not to mention a daily dose of wanderlust!