A new year and a new wildlife art painting! Well, sort of new. I actually started creating this one back in early December but it’s taken quite a while to form into something shareable! I’ve been planning this piece for months and so I’m quite excited that it is now well and truly underway.
The inspiration for this tiger painting came about when I stumbled across a rare happy statistic in the conservation world that Amur tiger numbers are actually increasing. Amur tigers (aka Siberian Tigers) did in fact become almost extinct in the 1940s, when just 40 remained in the wild. Thankfully, due to extensive conservation efforts, and Russia’s ban on tiger hunting, Amur tiger numbers have slowly increased so that by 2020 as many as 540 were recorded. Three other subspecies of tiger have already been driven to extinction at the hands of humankind, making the comeback of the Amur Tiger all the more poignant.
It seems so rare nowadays to hear positive stories relating to the state of our natural world, and so I wanted to do a piece to celebrate that and show that there is some hope if we can pull together and work with nature rather than against it. Tiger numbers overall, across 6 different subspecies, are still desperately low, making tigers the most critically endangered of the big cat species. But through conservation and political co-operation, the Amur tiger story shows us that it is possible to help these majestic creatures to thrive again.
