The Finnish painter Samuli Heimonen was chosen as the country’s young artist of the year in 2008 and he received the Tapper Art Society medal in 2003.

By seeing that animals are symbols or metaphors of the human psyche and they represent fears, dreams, worry or death, he mostly painted animal figures, especially wolves, because he wanted to let people see the dignity, beauty and the importance of the wolf as a wild animal.

To him, animals seem to crystallize in a great way something fundamentally human. An animal or the nature is a mirror which provides an interesting platform to study the human being.

His work is not only about figurative animal paintings but also about landscape pictures and a big canvas of sheep and wolves called “Nothing bad can happen on such a beautiful day as this”.

“An animal figure acts as a unifying force in my newer paintings. Human constructions get the shape of a gigantic animal. Sometimes the animal is clearly embodied, other times less clearly”, he said on his website.

You can see more on his website and wowxwow.