Featured image: Rainbow Safari, Danielle Cowdrey, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 in. / 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
Danielle Cowdrey’s vivid acrylic works burst from the canvas with electrifying color and fantastical energy.
Danielle Cowdrey paints psychedelic creatures infused with surreal energy, reimagining animals and icons through radiant color and whimsical symbolism.
Drawing inspiration from folklore, imagination, and animal symbolism, Cowdrey fuses vibrant psychedelia with surreal storytelling. Her paintings invite viewers into enchanted realms, each rendered with meticulous linework, radiant color palettes, and bold emotional presence. These works form a whimsical bestiary that challenges how we perceive identity, memory, and wildness in both nature and fiction.
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Cheshire Smile, Danielle Cowdrey, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 in. / 30.48 x 30.48 cm.
In “Cheshire Smile,” Cowdrey reinvents Lewis Carroll’s iconic feline with a full psychedelic bloom of fur. The cat’s eyes, immense and kaleidoscopic, suggest alternate dimensions, while the rainbow-coated fur appears to flicker with movement. The black backdrop amplifies the color’s intensity, as if the character is manifesting from a dream. The work isn’t just playful, it hums with slightly sinister mysticism, a reminder of how charm and madness often intermingle in the subconscious.
Absolem's Garden, Danielle Cowdrey, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 in. / 50.8 x 40.64 cm.
“Absolem’s Garden” continues the Alice in Wonderland theme, centering the wise, cryptic caterpillar Absolem. The painting immerses us in a surreal mushroom forest filled with biomorphic textures, glowing spores, and flowering fractals. Absolem’s segmented body becomes a psychedelic tapestry of heart-shaped patterns, anatomical curls, and neon hues. The fantasy isn’t escapist, it’s a visual expression of transformation and the cosmic possibilities of growth, metamorphosis, and curiosity.
Wooly Mammoth, Danielle Cowdrey, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 in. / 30.48 x 30.48 cm.
In “Wooly Mammoth,” Cowdrey brings prehistoric memory into a bold, electric present. The mammoth’s massive head dominates the canvas with cascading rainbow fur and hypnotic detail. Like the Cheshire Cat, its eyes hold a human-like consciousness, ancient, soulful, and strange. Cowdrey anthropomorphizes the extinct giant, turning it into a technicolor relic of myth and memory. The mammoth doesn’t look lost, it looks resurrected, reimagined, and defiantly alive.
Together, these works explore the liminal boundary between reality and the fantastical. Whether rooted in literature, prehistory, or fantasy, each creature becomes a mirror of inner wildness, animated by the artist’s electrified palette. Cowdrey’s universe is one where color transcends description and beings exist between the seen and the felt, playful, powerful, and uncontained.
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Neon Peonies, Danielle Cowdrey, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 in. / 50.8 x 50.8 cm.
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