Chameleon #3 (2025)

“Chameleon #3 by British artist Tim Willcox is a contemporary abstract mixed-media painting exploring the shifting relationship between urban expansion and natural landscapes. Using layered textures, architectural fragments, organic forms and a vivid palette, this work reflects the evolving dialogue between green space, development and environmental change.”

Chameleon #3 continues my exploration of how cities grow, mutate and absorb the landscapes beneath them. In this piece, I wanted the surface to feel alive and constantly re-negotiating itself. The floating architectural plan fragments, the drifting shapes and the softened wish balloons all became part of this gentle tug of war between constructed order and the quieter insistence of nature.

I worked deliberately with collage this time, slipping fragments of building layouts into the landscape and then letting the greens and soft transitional colours blur their edges. For me, that’s the chameleon moment: places that appear fixed or engineered beginning to dissolve into something more fluid, something that remembers what it used to be before development pushed its way in. This whole painting is really about adaptation, uncertainty and the way landscapes try to hold their ground even as the rules keep shifting around them.

I’m enjoying how this series lets me move between structure and looseness, story and instinct, without needing to overstate anything. The meaning is there, but it rises through the paint and collage layers rather than sitting on top of it.