Avenues Painter Heads to London with an Abstract “Wildlife” Painting

By 15 Bytes on June 14, 2026 • ( Leave a comment )

Nadia Cross, “Rock Wave,” acrylic and pen on canvas, 30×30 in.

There are a couple of things that won’t make sense at first glance. What does London have to do with wildlife? What’s a Utah artist doing there? And isn’t that painting a landscape?

Start with the announcement: Salt Lake City-based painter Nadia Cross has been named a finalist in the David Shepherd Wildlife Artist of the Year 2026 competition, and her piece “Rock Wave” will hang at London’s Mall Galleries from September 8–12, selected from 1,496 entries across 60 countries in the competition’s Abstract World category. The David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation, which runs the show, has spent two decades on conservation and education work across Africa and Asia.

Cross grew up in Zimbabwe, where she developed what she describes as a lifelong attachment to the land before training as an architect in the UK. Her work there included projects at Buckingham Palace. In 2017 she moved to Utah, and the move reoriented her—the terrain around her, rather than the buildings she’d been designing, became the thing she wanted to work with. During the pandemic, architecture gave way to painting.

Nadia Cross, image courtesy of the artist

“The dynamic landscapes of Utah continually challenge my perception of form, light, and color,” Cross says.

That’s where “Rock Wave” comes from — not an animal, or a scene of wilderness in the conventional sense, but a 30×30 in. acrylic and pen study of a rock face near Kanab. Up close, the painting reads as pure abstraction: a dense field of interlocking shapes in red, white, black, and blue, built up the way Cross builds most of her work—taking the sweeping, eroded geometry of southern Utah’s canyon country and reconstructing it into something closer to a mosaic. The architectural training shows up here, in the way the composition holds together as structure rather than just texture.

It’s also, in its way, a wildlife painting with no wildlife in it—or maybe wildlife hiding in plain sight. Situated in a wildlife competition, the abstract pattern starts to suggest things: is that the face of a fox emerging in the center, or a bird’s wing in the upper corner? Maybe. But it doesn’t have to resolve that way. The Abstract World category is part of a broader conversation the Foundation makes about conservation, that habitat is the thing worth protecting, not just the species living in it.

Cross’s stake in that argument isn’t abstract, either — she grew up in Zimbabwe, where the Foundation has run conservation and education programs for two decades, and half the proceeds from the London show go toward conservation work across Africa and Asia.

Cross, who works from a studio in the Salt Lake City Avenues, recently completed a new collection, Salt & Summit, looking at the Wasatch Front against Utah’s high desert.