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Zed Nelson spots the painting on the wall behind me almost as soon as we begin our interview.
“It’s perfect,” he said.
The canvas depicts a sleeping tiger draped across a velvet cushion, floating among pastel-shade leaves and flowers. The London-based photographer doesn’t mean “perfect” as in “masterfully painted;” he means it’s the perfect metaphor for the idealized, human-centric relationship we’ve cultivated with nature.
The painting reminds him of another artwork, “A young Tiger Playing With Its Mother,” by the French Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix, who used a captive tiger at a zoo and his pet cat as models.
