5 Artists Creating Murals And Wall-Based Art Inspired By Nature

Forbes

24-03-2025

Sophie Mess, Journey of Progress 2025, Saatchi Gallery © Matt Chung
Contemporary Artists Anne von Freyburg, Epoh Beech, Gary Myatt, Graphic Rewilding and Sophie Mess create murals and wall-based art that is inspired by nature or botany and demonstrates the uplifting power of art to improve urban environments and interiors.
In an age of rapid urbanization and increasing dependence on screens and devices, a growing number of artists are reconnecting with the natural world through their work. Whether on the walls of galleries or in the public sphere through murals, these artists are harnessing the power of nature to uplift, inspire, and provoke thought.
Many people living in cities have relentlessly busy lives with hectic work schedules which mean that taking time out for a walk in nature is impossible. There is increasing evidence that walking in nature–or even being exposed to images of nature–can improve mental health and reduce anxiety.
A growing movement of contemporary artists are creating exterior or interior murals or wall-based art, often inspired by nature, which offers a visual boost to the senses and temporary respite from the pressure of contemporary life.
By infusing public and private spaces with nature's beauty, Anne von Freyburg, Epoh Beech, Gary Myatt, Graphic Rewilding, and Sophie Mess are creating art that doesn't just hang on walls—it resonates with viewers, inviting them to pause, reflect, and remember the magnificence of the natural world.
Two of the artists featured here–Sophie Mess and Anne Von Freyburg–are currently exhibiting in the Saatchi Gallery exhibition FLOWERS: Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture, and artist duo Graphic Rewilding have recently unveiled larger-than-life floral installations in Houston, Texas.
Gary Myatt paints beautiful murals inspired by Old Master paintings and William Morris's Arts & Crafts movement, and his commissions have included Bacchanalia and Annabel's in London and murals in India and Sweden.
Epoh Beech is preparing for a solo exhibition in London–The Pegasus Papers–which will feature a new series of hand-drawn wallpaper inspired by French narrative-style wallpapers, the Bayeux Tapestry and ancient Chinese handscrolls. Her wallpaper will be exhibited alongside pen and ink drawings and hand drawn animations featuring motifs drawn from nature and mythology, such as Hermes the seal and Pegasus the winged horse.
Sophie Mess
Sophie Mess at Saatchi Gallery © Matt Chung
Sophie Mess is an artist whose work is a quiet meditation on the delicate beauty of nature. Her murals and wall-based pieces often focus on the subtle nuances of the natural world—leaves in the wind, a bird in flight, or a single flower in bloom.
Her latest artwork is an eight-meter-high mural Journey of Progress, commissioned for the Saatchi Gallery exhibition Flowers: Flora in Contemporary Art and Culture. Based in the Devon countryside, Mess's bold botanical murals can be found in Europe from five-story buildings in France, hotel rooftops in Rome, city centre squares in Sweden, and throughout the UK. Her art blends elements of graffiti, pop art, and traditional muralism to create large-scale, immersive works. Her murals are known for their vivid use of color and abstract forms. Mess's murals are rooted in a belief that art has the power to create positive impact on the environment and elevate mental wellbeing.
Sophie Mess at Saatchi Gallery © Lee Sharrock
Her work seeks to break down the boundaries between urban environments and artistic expression, using walls as a canvas to tell stories. Mess fuses street art's rawness with the controlled techniques of fine art in her murals, and she demonstrates a deep understanding of traditional artistic principles, which she applies in her murals through a careful play of composition, perspective, and form. Yet, there is a freedom and boldness to her work that speaks to the rebellious nature of street art.
I spoke to Sophie Mess at the Saatchi Gallery where her mural is a highlight of the Flowers exhibition, greeting visitors as they arrive. She told me what attracted her to street art and murals: 'What drew me to murals is that I just love painting big, and I love the energy of spray paint, it's a very fast, big medium. And painting in the public is really fun–I enjoy all the little interactions you get when people stop and chat to you–so It's a really engaging artform I've found.'
She cites her inspirations as Dutch Master floral still life paintings and Georgia O'Keeffe's detailed flower paintings. Mess has also started growing flowers in her garden which she uses for her murals, and a tulip from her garden features in the Saatchi Gallery mural. She explains: 'I've only had a garden for the last three years and now that I've got a garden–it's only tiny–I absolutely love it. I'm growing lots of tulips, lilies, roses, irises and Clematises. I love Georgia O'Keeffe and her other-worldly spin on florals. I think mostly I'm just constantly being inspired by contemporary artists and my peers in the street art world.'
Flowers – Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture is at Saatchi Gallery until 5th May, 2025.
Anne von Freyburg
Anne von Freyburg portrait.
Anne von Freyburg is a Dutch artist based in London and is exhibiting in group exhibition Flowers at Saatchi Gallery, where she will also have her own solo exhibition titled Filthy Cute opening on 27th March.
Anne von Freyburg embraces textiles and decorative art and is inspired by Rococo paintings 17th century Dutch Still Life artists such as Jan van Huysum. Her wall-based floral textiles are a unique way of bringing nature into interiors in a bold, sculptural way. I spoke to von Freyburg as she prepared for the solo show and asked what her inspirations are. She explains: 'Last year I started looking into the 17th century Dutch Still-Life and made three textile pieces after Jan van Huysum's flower still-life. As a Dutch artist I thought it was time to look into these fetishised, luxurious commodities and their dark colonial history. The flower-still life was one of the few subjects that women were allowed to paint. Men who painted flowers were then again a bit frowned upon. During the early preparations for my solo show the curator of Saatchi Gallery saw this work and immediately wanted it one for the 'Flowers' group show.'
ANNE VON FREYBURG
And what can people expect from her solo exhibition? 'Filthy Cute is an overview of my textile paintings spanning from 2022 to 2025. The show winks at western painting, beauty, fashion, pop and cute culture. The center-piece of the exhibition is a big wall-installation of irregular shape with dripping fringes in saturated colours. It reimagines one of the scenes from the Rococo paintings of Fragonard's Progress of Love series – known as one of the most powerful evocations of love in the history of art. My interpretation of the story is to not fall for the clichés and tropes of heterosexual romance but to be free and stay true to one self. No more fairy tales about men saving women, but women being the heroine in their own life story.'
Graphic Rewilding
Portrait of Graphic Rewilding
Brighton-based artists Lee Baker and Catherine Borowski co-founded Graphic Rewilding on a mission to uplift people's lives with large-scale botanical and nature-inspired artworks created for urban environments. They connected by chance eleven years ago at Heathrow airport when they found themselves on the same flight to New York discussing their creative sensibilities. Borowski had a background in large scale events and curation and encouraged Baker to introduce his studio based nature art practice into the public arena, and so Graphic Rewilding was born.
Baker & Borowski's creations inspire people to connect with the natural world and are aimed at providing some visual endorphins as an antidote to the lack of green spaces associated with urban living. Graphic Rewilding's uplifting murals and art installations have popped up around the UK and in China, Italy, Saudi Arabia and Texas.
Baker explained to me how inspired he is by Japan and Japanese art: 'Through Murakami's lecture on the origin of the "Superflat" art concept Icame into contact with an Edo-era painter called Ito Jakuchu who had spent ten years painting a scroll series called 'The Colourful Realm of Living Beings'. The title alone had me captivated. I travelled to Japan for his retrospective exhibition and in front of his works I felt an indescribable power. I found his grave in Kyoto, gathered up leaves from the area and to this day I sprinkle a tiny amount of these leaves into my paint.'
Artistic Statements, Westfield by Graphic Rewilding © Mark Cocksedge
Baker & Borowski both grew up in urban environments–Borowski living in a London council flat with a tarmac car park view from her window, while Baker experienced what he describes as 'A total ambivalence to real nature'–so they both wanted to offer some uplifting urban art experiences to lift people out of their concrete reality.
Baker explains how anecdotal evidence backs up research that art featuring nature can have positive effects on mental wellbeing: 'As an example, early on with Graphic Rewilding we created a project inspired by Victorian pleasure gardens on some ugly, unused asphalted land on a busy road in London. This was a blend of art and planting and as soon as we opened it to the public, people flooded in and used the space, to play, to eat their lunch, to relax. People said that there was hardly any public green space in the area and that even our theatrical garden was a hugely welcome addition to their community. But this isn't isolated, we see this reaction time and time again.
Through Graphic Rewilding the city is our canvas and in London alone we have covered nearly 4.5 square km with our uplifting floral artworks. Our nature-inspired installations have given building facades floral makeovers, added meadows to billboards, and graphically rewilded entire streets, but has also reached into the digital realm with mobile animated AR experiences enhancing our work. We are certainly not proposing this as a replacement for nature, but I just want to illustrate that our brains can be hacked to suspend disbelief and accept that though we are not interacting with real trees, rocks, or animals, we are psychologically benefitting from a totally imagined nature scenario. Something the artist David Hockney likes to describe as, 'New Nature'.'
Epoh Beech
Epoh Beech in her studio © Justin Piperger.
London-based artist Epoh Beech studied as a fine artist at Studio Simi in Florence, Cheltenham Art School and Chelsea College of Art, and has an MA in Art Therapy from the University of Hertfordshire. Her award winning hand-drawn animation The Masque of Blackness – Reimagined was projected onto The National Theatre Flytower on London's Southbank in September 2018 as part of The Thames Festival, and she is preparing for a solo exhibition in South Kensington.
Titled The Pegasus Papers, the exhibition will feature hand-drawn wallpaper designs full of references to nature and mythological subjects. The Pegasus Papers comprise four digitally printed wallpaper designs and a collection of the pen and ink drawings combined to create them.
Epoh Beech 'The Pegasus Papers' wallpaper ©"Justin Piperger.
Beech told me about her influences, and what inspired her to create hand-drawn wallpaper: 'I have been interested in the relationship between still and moving images for a long time, this has been part of my practice for the last 15 years. I think it is interesting that, as with Chinese Scroll paintings and the Bayeaux Tapestry, we animate images over time as we look at them particularly when there is a narrative which we engage with. I have always loved narrative style wallpapers, so this was the inspiration to work with the images from my animations to make 4 narrative style wallpaper designs I call The Pegasus Papers.
It kept sketch books for the designs and let the images evolve slowly over time, I was interested in continuing the narrative from my animations and using many of the same images from The Masque of Blackness Reimagined and The Marriage of The Thasmes and The Rhine for example Hermes, a time traveling grey seal and Pegasus the mythological flying horse.re appear. In The Pegasus Papers.
To create the bespoke wallpaper designs, Beech draws the images in pen and ink on paper before translating them into a wallpaper repeat. The drawings are then scanned at a very high resolution, put into a printing file and sent to the wallpaper factory in Lancashire.
She explains: 'The whole process for the wallpaper designs started in 2021, I have been working on The Pegasus Papers for 4 years, it has taken about 1 year for each design. But the ideas were formed over the last 15 years ago when I visited the Toile de Jouy Museum near Paris. Their designs all have such strong stories the images come alive and they move in the viewer's imagination.'
Epoh Beech: The Pegasus Papers is at 11 Avenue Studios, Sydney Mews, London SW3 6HL from 31st March until 6th April, 2025.
Gary Myatt
Gary Myatt studio profile by Gary Morrisroe
Mural artist and trompe l'oeil specialist Gary Myatt is a Central St. Martin's and Wimbledon School of Art alumni based in London. His many commissions during a 20-year career have included bespoke murals for iconic London club Annabel's and society restaurant Bacchanalia, while his talents have led to commission in Europe, India and the Middle East.
He specializes in hand-painted murals and trompe l'oeil artwork inspired by Old Masters and is often inspired by nature. He told me where he draws inspiration from, and how incorporating natural imagery into his wall murals can create a distinct atmosphere: 'The murals I create, inspired by landscape, are not designed as trompe l'oeil illusions or picturesque windows looking out onto some kind of idyll. Instead, my focus is on evoking a distinct atmosphere or energy within the space that resonates with each interior's natural surroundings. I am fascinated by the infinite variety of nature's visual language: the subtle transitions of colour and texture; the interplay of light and shade; the contrast between hard and soft edges; the depth of aerial perspective, and the way elements subtly emerge and recede from view. In my landscape murals I aim to translate these nuances into paint, distilling the essence of the landscape into something that rings true.'
Landscape Mural by Gary Myatt
Myatt gives a bit of insight into the process: 'In terms of process, I paint my murals on canvas in my studio before installing them on site. This method not only ensures greater control over the final piece but also proves to be the most practical and cost-effective approach for all involved.'