Nature’s Art Gallery Featuring the Tarantula Hawk

I’ve just finished a new artwork, and I’m still deciding whether I’ve captured something quietly magnificent or something no child should ever meet on the page. The Tarantula Hawk is not a gentle creature. Even drawn in soft psychedelic colours, it carries an intensity that refuses to be ignored.

There’s a part of me that wants to place it in the next kids’ book, More Uncommon Animals of the Alphabet, simply because the natural world is full of beings that don’t apologise for their power or their strangeness. Another part of me wonders if this is the sort of page that keeps kids awake at night after filling their heads with the real life horrors of the world. After all, the humble Tarantula Hawk inspired Ridley Scott’s Alien. The chest bursting scene, for example, owes a quiet debt to this creature. While I sort that out, the limited edition print is available, and it will sit on a wall with the kind of confidence that doesn’t ask permission.

What is your favorite place to go in your city?

I’m meant to say an art gallery or a café, somewhere human made, curated, tidy around the edges. But the place I return to again and again is the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. It is the closest thing we have to a cathedral built out of living matter.

The paths wind through trees older than any idea I have ever had. The air feels different there, thicker with things growing and decaying in the quiet way the natural world prefers. Walking under the canopy, I’m reminded why I began drawing animals in the first place, because nature is already making the best art and most people are too busy to notice.

In the gardens, the noise of life falls away. The plants don’t ask for attention; they simply stand there, rooted in their own certainty. It is the one place in the city where I feel both grounded and wide open, as if some part of me remembers that I’m an animal too, built from the same stuff as the trees and the damp soil beneath them.

That is where ideas settle, and where creatures like the Tarantula Hawk take shape in my mind. Not as horrors, but as reminders of the strangeness we share the world with. Whether it makes its way into the next kids’ book or not, the artwork exists because of that place, and because walking through those gardens always nudges my imagination awake in a way no café or gallery ever could.

Limited Edition Hand-Signed Art Print

• Price $100 AUD with free shipping worldwide
• Size 30cm x 30cm
• Gallery-grade print on lightly textured, 100% cotton paper — museum-quality you can feel.
• Strictly limited to 10 prints — each one is hand-signed and numbered by the artist.
• Includes a certificate of authenticity with matching edition number.
• Features a 1–2 inch (2.5–5.0 cm) white border for easy framing.
• Packaged with care in protective materials to ensure it arrives safely.
• Printing and shipping will take 3-4 weeks

Order your limited edition print