You sit down to paint a wolf. Ten minutes in, it’s no longer a wolf; it’s “loneliness.” Add a darker background? Now it’s “existential dread.” Congratulations, you didn’t paint an animal; you accidentally created a therapy session on canvas.
You’ve been trained subtly, persistently to turn animals into symbols. Fox equals cunning. Owls equal wisdom. Deer equals fragility. It’s practically visual shorthand at this point. But here’s the uncomfortable question: what if the animal never asked for that role?
When you paint animals as symbols, you flatten them. You replace their presence with your projection. And somewhere between the brushstroke and the meaning, the animal disappears.
In Vermont contemporary art, there’s a quiet but powerful shift happening: artists are stepping away from metaphor-heavy depictions and moving toward something more honest, more restrained, and strangely more emotional.
If you want your work to feel alive, you have to stop explaining it. You have to start seeing.
Let’s break down how you actually do that.

Observe Before You Interpret

Before your brain jumps in with labels, stories, or personality traits, you need to interrupt it. Because the moment you name what you’re seeing, you stop actually seeing it.
You don’t paint a “majestic horse.” You paint the angle of its neck, the tension in its legs, the uneven rhythm of light across its back.
Force yourself into raw observation. Set a timer for five minutes, no more, and sketch without thinking. Don’t “fix” anything. Don’t make it pretty. Just record what’s in front of you.
When you do this, something shifts. You start noticing things you usually ignore: the awkward weight distribution, the asymmetry, the way fur clumps instead of flows.
This is where authenticity begins, not in meaning, but in attention.

Focus on Physical Presence, Not Personality

You’ve probably been told to “capture the soul” of the animal. That sounds poetic, but it’s also dangerously vague and often leads you straight into symbolism.
Instead, focus on what you can prove exists.
Fur has direction. Weight has gravity. Bodies occupy space in very specific, sometimes uncomfortable ways. When you paint these physical truths, something unexpected happens: the animal feels real.
Texture becomes your language. Not as decoration, but as evidence. Thick, uneven strokes can communicate density. Soft blending can suggest fragility without ever needing to declare it.
You don’t need to paint “a sad dog.” You paint the heaviness of its posture, the stillness in its stance, the way its body settles into the ground.
Let the viewer feel it. Don’t tell them what to feel.

Let Silence Exist in Your Work
 

You’re probably afraid of empty space. Most artists are. You think that if you don’t fill every inch or explain every element, the work will feel incomplete.
But silence is not absence. Its presence without noise.
When you stop overworking your canvas, you give the animal room to exist without interruption. You allow ambiguity to breathe. And ambiguity is powerful; it invites the viewer in instead of pushing meaning onto them.
This is something you’ll notice often in contemporary art: a restraint that feels almost uncomfortable at first. There’s less explanation, fewer visual cues, and more trust in the viewer’s ability to experience rather than decode.
Try this: leave parts of your painting unresolved. Not sloppy, intentional. Let the edges disappear. Let backgrounds fade into suggestion.
Silence doesn’t weaken your work. It deepens it.

Paint from Memory, Not Just Reference

Reference photos are helpful, but they’re also dangerous. They lock you into detail without understanding.
Memory, on the other hand, filters what matters.
When you observe an animal and then step away before painting, you’re forced to reconstruct it from what stayed with you. Not everything, just the essentials. The weight. The gesture. The presence.
This process strips away clichés. You’re no longer copying a perfect image; you’re translating an experience.
Try this exercise: spend ten minutes observing an animal (real or photographed). Then walk away. No peeking. Paint from memory.
What you lose in precision, you gain in honesty.
Your work starts to feel less like documentation and more like recalling something lived, not just seen.

Resist the Urge to Explain

This is where most artists undo all their good work.
You finish a painting that feels subtle, open, and alive, and then you title it something like “The Burden of Isolation.”
And just like that, you’ve told the viewer what to think.
You don’t trust them. Or worse, you don’t trust the work.
If you want to avoid turning animals into symbols, you have to stop explaining them after the fact. That includes titles, descriptions, and even how you talk about your work.
Let it be experienced, not decoded.
The moment you impose a fixed meaning, you close off all the others. And the beauty of painting animals this way is that it allows for multiple, shifting interpretations, none of which are forced.
Trust the ambiguity. It’s doing more work than you think.
 

Conclusion

Once you no longer interpret animals through symbols, you’ll discover an interesting thing. Meaning will not be diminished. It will become deeper.

Rather than storytelling, you are engaging in creating a connection with the subject matter. Rather than imposing your emotions, you’re letting them surface. The animal isn’t a symbol or an object of a certain emotion; the animal is just being there, and that’s what matters.
It’s not always easy to practice such an approach. It demands restraint, patience, and a release from control. Yet, its rewards can be quite significant, leading to the creation of much quieter and more effective pieces.

Are you interested in learning more about authentic presence-based artistry and how it looks when applied in practice from a personal perspective? If yes, you might want to take a closer look at the portfolio at https://www.brendamyrickart.com/.