I painted this beautiful lion with a watchful and attentive gaze, a three-quarter turned head and a mane moved by the wind. I used the colors of the earths and the whites to emphasize its warm tones, which emerge from the black background creating a strong contrast of light and dark. This work is made with oil colors on a canvas 100 cm x 80 cm. The animal has a proud and majestic pose.
All my paintings are entirely handmade and are unique and original pieces.
My artworks, of hyperrealistic and with a photographic style, have got as main subjects animals, mostly exotic ones such as elephants, giraffes or leopards, or typical of the Sardinian territory. I manage to highlight the details, meticulously cared for, and to focus attention on the subject, which is the only character of the work: the background, in fact, is absent, it is mostly monochrome and it emphasizes the focus on the animal, abstracting and extracting it from a real space.
My style is defined as pop - hyperrealism because the subjects are painted following a detailed technique, but their position in an unreal space gives the artworks features that are more typical of pop art, so hyperrealism and a graphic style melt. I use different techniques according to the subject and the effects I want to obtein.
Look at the gallery with all my paintings: https://www.tizianasanna.com/en/animals
Watch the video on Facebook of the realization:
https://www.facebook.com/100007172895231/videos/1999926470256430/
Some information about the lion, the alpha predator.
The lion (Panthera leo) is a carnivorous mammal from the Felidae family. After the tiger, it is the largest of the five large felids of the Panthera genus, its body mass exceeding 250 kg. Since 2011 he has lived almost exclusively in sub-Saharan Africa; the continued depletion of its natural habitat and the continuation of poaching against it make it a vulnerable species according to the IUCN. This definition is justified by an estimated decline of 30 to 50% in the African area in the previous twenty years. A very small population survives in the Gir Forest National Park in India, while the specimens that inhabited North Africa and the Middle East have disappeared for many centuries. Until about ten thousand years ago, the lion was the second most common large mammal after humans. At that time, lions were found in most of Eurasia and Africa, and even in North America from Yukon to Peru.
It is a so-called alpha predator, i.e. it ranks at the top of the food chain, having no predators in nature, apart from man (and exceptionally the Nile crocodile), but nevertheless, it can perform looting in case of extreme need. Lions do not hunt man regularly, but some particular specimens have done so. For both the African and Asian subspecies, it became necessary to create and maintain national parks and reserves. The best known are the Etosha National Park in Namibia, the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, and the Kruger National Park in the eastern part of South Africa.
Outside of these areas, the contrasts between lions and men or livestock are typically resolved by eliminating felines. In India, the last refuge for the Asiatic lion is the Gir Forest National Park, 1412 km² wide and located in the west of the country. The park was home to 359 lions in 2005. As in Africa, numerous men's homes are located near the park, resulting in clashes between lions, domestic cattle, locals and forest officials. The project for the reintroduction of the Asiatic lion is aimed at establishing a second independent population in the Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary in the state of Madhya Pradesh. This second population would aim to create the necessary genetic diversity for the survival of the species. An example are the twelve lions of the Port Lympne Zoo in Kent, England, which are descendants of the animals owned by the King of Morocco. Eleven other lions live in the Addis Ababa zoo and are expected to descend from animals owned by Emperor Haile Selassie I. WildLink International, in collaboration with the University of Oxford, has launched the ambitious Barbary Lion Project, aimed at identifying and breeding Berber lions in captivity to reintroduce them to the Atlas National Park in Morocco.
In the photo: hyperrealistic lion painting made with oil colors on a canvas 100 cm x 80 cm by Tisha (Tiziana Sanna)