It’s easy to forget that long before human evolution, dinosaurs roamed many of the same landscapes we love to visit today. For a special project, land artist David Popa brought back this prehistoric wildlife as large-scale portraits.
The three works were made as part of the American artist’s participation in the second season of “Prehistoric Planet” on Apple TV, narrated by nature documentary legend Sir David Attenborough.
A 100-foot-wide mammoth representation of a T-Rex head bearing its teeth was composed on the red rock of a Utah desert. Traveling far and wide, Popa also drew a Hatzegopteryx – most notable for its enormous wings – on a remote island in Finland, where it lives.
Finally, a Triceratops has appeared along the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, England, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a major destination for fossil collectors.
Ancient animals were drawn directly on the earth, incorporating the natural textures of the terrain into images made using organic materials like charcoal, chalk and earth pigments. Each labor lasted up to 15 hours.
“It looks like the skin of a Triceratops,” Popa said. BBC News on the role of the land surface in the work. “I didn’t have to overdo it because it worked for me.”
Due to their large size, the portraits can only be seen in their entirety from above and were documented by drones before inevitably being worn down by time.
“We’re so used to seeing things on a horizontal plane,” Popa said. “But how many beautiful places are there that look completely different from top to bottom? There are an unlimited number of places that look otherworldly.
Popa is no stranger to making art under difficult conditions. Other examples of him working in nature include a series of faces drawn in charcoal on shards of ice. These pieces were also very ephemeral, although photos of the lost images were sold as limited edition prints and 1/1 NFTs.
