Nicole Parish’s intense love for insects has followed her for as long as she can remember, and she decided to make them the main subject of her art. Her body of work captures insects in intricate detail, and she often uses her personal collection as a reference to make her paintings as accurate as possible.
Parish describes herself as an autistic insect artist, and her paintings are a love letter to the natural world. She spent her childhood playing outdoors and looking for insects in the dirt after the book A Girl of the Limberlost made her fall in love with this overlooked species.
“I then grew up taking care of praying mantises, beetles, butterflies, and moths, along with other creatures like snails and spiders. Saving the insects I found and cared for, I learned how to preserve them once they passed. My collection grew and soon became the subject of my art,” she explains on her official website.
One of the best things about Parish’s paintings is her incredible attention to detail. She has an impressive personal collection of insects and has a habit of placing them next to the canvas to use as a reference. By doing so, she’s able to capture insects as accurately as possible, and most of them are painted in scale.
