Tanya Merrill’s paintings spin contemporary myths—quick, lively lines and luminous color carrying scenes where animals and figures navigate desire, humor, and the tangle between culture and nature.

Made while she was pregnant, Last self-portrait before I became a mother casts the artist as a floating nude suspended above a familiar landscape, her body poised over a cliff like a living pedestal. The drawing-forward surface—sketched contours, translucent washes—keeps the image airy and immediate, as if we’ve caught the moment mid-breath. It’s a picture of threshold and becoming: buoyant, a little mischievous, and charged with anticipation, where the ground below feels both home and stage. In spirit, the work nods to Dalí’s The God of the Bay of Roses: a female figure held aloft over an emblematic form, the body standing in for creation itself. Merrill shifts that grandeur into a personal register—less divine monument, more intimate myth—where transformation is located in a specific place, a specific person, and a new life about to arrive.