When Kelsey Oseid was five years old, her grandpa gave her an encyclopedic volume on animals. Oseid spent her childhood pouring over it, obsessing over the huge variety of species and rigorously scientific illustrations. It’s a feeling Oseid works hard to recreate in her work, heavily influenced by the field guide school of naturalistic illustration. Oseid believes in the theory of botanical art; that you paint to understand. The act of observation and communication through a visual medium leads to a deeper level of comprehension, and this exploration lies at the center of her newest body of work, Unimaginable Animals.
Unimaginable Animals is a series of illustrations that illuminate some of the more unusual and incredible species on Earth. From the most unfathomably old to the most otherworldly resilient, Unimaginable Animals acts of a catalog of nature's endless sense of variety and ingenuity, and a celebration of the idea that truth in nature is often stranger than fiction.