Top 10 Times Nature Became the Artist

What happens when nature refuses to stay in the background?

Trees, flowers, stones, sand, weather, and scattered petals supply what no paintbrush can. This fixed editorial countdown ranks each work by how essential nature is to the final image, the originality of the collaboration, and its visual impact. Tap Love on your favorites—the 10-to-1 order stays fixed.

More: When Nature Becomes Design (12 Photos)

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10. 🌱 Smoked Gaze — By OMI in Bali, Indonesia 🇮🇩

In OMI’s own post for the mural, the smoking portrait is framed as a rule-breaking figure. The narrow wall works like a close-up film still: glossy lips, dark hair, and a rising thread of smoke dominate the painted image, while small living plants push into its lower edge.

💡 Nerd Fact: In his Meeting of Styles profile, Romi Hartono describes his practice as semi-realistic mural painting with an urban element, centered on character, expression and storytelling.

Why it ranks 10: Nature enters quietly rather than taking over, but that living edge gives the mural a finish paint alone could not create.

🔗 Follow OMI on Instagram

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9. 🌹 Feliç Sant Jordi! — By LEÓN in Barcelona, Spain 🇪🇸

LEÓN’s Sant Jordi mural turns the Catalan celebration into a street-side kiss: red dress, silver armor, rose, sword, birds, and butterflies. It stands at Carrer del Sots-Tinent Navarro 20. In Angeles’s photograph, real red petals spread from the wall across the pavement and give the flat image a physical foreground.

💡 Nerd Fact: Sant Jordi falls on 23 April, the date that UNESCO selected for World Book and Copyright Day in 1995 because it is associated with the deaths of Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.

Why it ranks 9: The petals turn the bottom edge of the mural into a scene that can be rearranged by gravity, wind, and passing feet.

🔗 Follow LEÓN and photographer Angeles on Instagram

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8. 🌺 Floral Mural — By Emic at Lower Lascar Row, Hong Kong 🇭🇰

For HKWALLS 2025, Belfast-based Emic painted lilies, roses, and orchids across a deep-purple wall at Lower Lascar Row. Above the paint, real pink bougainvillea spills through the brickwork and drops living color directly into the composition.

💡 Nerd Fact: HKWALLS 2025 was the festival’s tenth edition. Its nine-day program placed murals across Hong Kong’s Central and Western District and displayed digital works on LED screens elsewhere in the city.

Why it ranks 8: The match is so seamless that the painted flowers appear to keep growing beyond the wall, while seasonal blooms can quietly redraw its upper edge.

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7. 🌿 “Ven a la Luz” — By Daniel Popper at Ahau Tulum, Mexico 🇲🇽

Daniel Popper’s official project page identifies Ven a la Luz as a 33-foot sculpture made for Art With Me in 2018 from steel, wood, rope, and natural fibres at Ahau Tulum. The monumental figure opens its chest around a planted passage, turning the body into architecture visitors can walk through.

💡 Nerd Fact: Ven a la Luz translates as “come into the light.” According to Popper’s project history, the same open-chest pose also appears in Thrive and Hallow, while the original work was conceived in relation to Tulum’s fragile coastal ecosystem.

Why it ranks 7: Structure, tropical planting, and human scale work as one system. Remove the greenery and the open chest loses much of its sense of life.

More: Come in to Light — Wooden Sculpture by Daniel Popper

🔗 Visit Daniel Popper’s website

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6. 🐦 Bluetit — By Hannah Bullen-Ryner in the UK 🇬🇧

In the artist’s post for this tiny blue tit, Bullen-Ryner describes its moss-and-lichen belly and shares the work as a message of love and hope. She builds the bird directly on the earth from found natural materials, arranging color, texture, wing, eye, and perch until the fragments seem ready to fly.

💡 Nerd Fact: Blue tits can see ultraviolet wavelengths that humans cannot. The British Trust for Ornithology notes that the crown feathers contain ultraviolet signals and that differences in UV contrast may communicate a male’s age or quality during mate selection.

Why it ranks 6: Every visible mark began as something found outdoors, and the same breeze that gives the work atmosphere can also scatter it.

More: Nature Is Everything! Artworks by Hannah Bullen-Ryner

🔗 Visit Hannah Bullen-Ryner’s website

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5. 🍃 “Leaveshroom Void” — By Jon Foreman at Little Milford Woods, Wales 🏴

Foreman identifies Leaveshroom Void as a 2025 work created at Little Milford Woods on October 25. He also described the delicate process, with sticks snapping and wind shifting the materials. Bent branches and yellow-green leaves radiate from the tree’s natural hollow rather than covering it.

💡 Nerd Fact: A tree hollow is also a biological microhabitat. The Woodland Trust records that cavities and rot holes can shelter bats, birds and beetles, while pockets of trapped rainwater may support microscopic crustaceans.

Why it ranks 5: The hollow is not empty space: it is the center that dictates every line, while filtered light keeps changing the leaf pattern.

More: Jon Foreman Uses Nature Like This (10 Photos)

🔗 Follow Jon Foreman on Instagram

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4. 🤲 “HAND and PARK TREE” (The Caring Hand) — By Eva Oertli & Beat Huber in Glarus, Switzerland 🇨🇭

In Glarus’s Volksgarten, oversized concrete fingers rise around a living tree. The municipality identifies the 2004 work as a collaboration by Eva Oertli and Beat Huber and documented its temporary removal for restoration in 2023. Its familiar name, The Caring Hand, captures the gesture: the trunk appears held and protected.

💡 Nerd Fact: The Glarus installation is no longer the only version. In 2024, a second Caring Hand by Oertli and Huber was installed at the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama, two decades after the Swiss work.

Why it ranks 4: The tree is the living subject, not an accessory. Its growth, leaves, and changing seasons continually remake the sculpture above the fixed hand.

More: The Caring Hand — Sculpture in Glarus, Switzerland

🔗 Visit Beat Huber’s project page

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3. 🌊 “Linear” — By Jon Foreman at Lindsway Bay, Wales 🏴

In Foreman’s post for Linear, he identifies it as a 2025 work created at Lindsway Bay and sums it up as “Simplicity, motion, colour.” Rows of selected beach stones stretch across the sand in a long fan, while the bay supplies the palette, scale, horizon, and deadline.

💡 Nerd Fact: The surrounding Pembrokeshire coast exposes an unusually long geological record. According to the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, nearly all of the rocks beneath the landscape formed more than 290 million years ago, while the region’s oldest exposures date back roughly 600 million years.

WhyWhy it ranks 3: The arrangement is exact, yet its beach setting makes permanence impossible. Nature provides both the materials and the final edit.

More: Jon Foreman Uses Nature Like This (10 Photos)

🔗 Follow Jon Foreman on Instagram

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2. 🐚 “La Vénus sur le sable” — By Jben & Thomas Cambois at Plage du Chay, Royan, France 🇫🇷

Jben’s account of the collaboration credits the Atelier des Arts Plastiques de Royan with bringing him and painter Thomas Cambois together to reinterpret Botticelli in sand. The Atelier archive calls the work La Vénus sur le sable and dates it to March 9, 2022, at Plage du Chay, where the 20-meter-tall Venus was drawn in 4 hours and 56 minutes during a single low tide.

💡 Nerd Fact: Botticelli’s title is slightly misleading. The Uffizi Galleries explains that the circa-1485 painting shows Venus arriving on Cyprus rather than the moment of her birth. The original is a 172.5-by-278.5-centimeter tempera painting on canvas.

Why it ranks 2: Sand moves a museum icon onto the shoreline at monumental scale, while the sea provides both the canvas and the clock.

More: Beach Art: Birth of Venus by Botticelli

🔗 Follow Jben beach art and Thomas Cambois atelier on Facebook

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1. 🌼 Sunlit Flower Afro — By Fábio Gomes Trindade in Trindade, Goiás, Brazil 🇧🇷

At Rua 70 in Setor Renata Park, Trindade, Fábio Gomes Trindade positioned a child’s portrait directly beneath a mass of yellow and orange blossoms. In his own post for the work, he paired it with a message that translates as “Racism is ignorance about what is different,” giving the joyful image a clear anti-racist frame. The painted face supplies the expression; the living plant supplies the Afro’s texture, volume, light, and movement.

💡 Nerd Fact: Before becoming a professional artist, Gomes worked in construction and later credited that experience with improving his sense of proportion. In a 2021 interview, he said that he began making wall art in 2014 and named Brazilian muralist Eduardo Kobra as an important influence.

Why it ranks 1: The collaboration reads in a second and keeps changing over time. Without the flowers, it is an unfinished portrait; with them, wall and garden become one unforgettable image.

More: Flower Mural by Fábio Gomes Trindade in Brazil

🔗 Follow Fábio Gomes Trindade on Instagram

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